It still blows me away after all these years that the American publishers of The Harry Potter books decided to have them "translated" from British to American. In fact they were so concerned that people wouldn't "get" the books that they changed the name of the first book from Philosopher's Stone to Sorcerer's Stone. This in spite of the fact that the whole book revolves around the item used in alchemy called a Philosopher's stone, known for its ability to turn lead to gold and being a key ingredient in the elixir of life that grants the user immortality.

To my mind that is an example of translation at its worst. Instead of doing the best possible job of communicating to a new audience the original work and the culture it represents, the work has been homogenised into sounding just like everything else its audience consumes. Readers of the book will get the impression that the people being represented in the book speak just like them - which is not true.

Translation is an incredibly difficult task especially when you are attempting to deal with literature. You can't just take the words from the other language and change them to the equivalent in your own because you might misconstrue the whole meaning or change the flavour of the book. The Harry Potter example isn't even translation, it's just changing the words because you want to with no thought to how it effects the story.

In my one attempt at translation, when interviewing Yasmina Kahdra, I discovered just how difficult it could be. I first had to translate all my questions from English to French and then translate his answers into English. I was able to get away with it only because I used Google's literal translation device and know enough French to know when Google was making a mess of things. Even then there was one question that got lost in translation: I garbled the question too much and he misunderstood what I had asked.

The most difficult part of translation is the fact that expressions may mean one thing literally, but another all together when used in their appropriate manner. For example, think of the expression "kick the bucket" in reference to someone dying. You couldn't translate that word for word and expect it to mean the same thing to a foreign reader as it did to us. You have to find a way of saying the same thing in their language and maintain the slang connotations of the expression. Using something formal like "he's passed over" instead of "kick the bucket" would change the character of the person who used the line in the first place.

I know I didn't do a perfect job of translating his answers into English and someday I'd like to pass his answers along to someone who is fluent in French and compare the results, but I also think I did a pretty good job of preserving who and what Yasmina Khadra is and what he had to say for himself.