By Ashok Kumar

Is translation an art or a skill? I think the question becomes more useful when we ask what a particular text needs. A translator must understand the source, choose words that work for another reader and check whether the result still serves the original purpose. Those choices call for practice and judgment.

What can be learned

Terminology, research and revision are skills. In a technical manual, a term must remain consistent and an instruction must be clear enough to follow. A translator can build a glossary, compare earlier translations and ask a subject expert when a word has more than one meaning. A computer-assisted translation tool can help recall a previous choice, but the translator still needs to check it in context.

Where judgment matters

Literary writing presents another problem: rhythm, register, a joke or a cultural reference may matter as much as the words themselves. Keeping an unfamiliar term can give the reader a sense of the original setting; choosing a familiar expression can make a sentence easier to read. Neither choice is automatically better. A short explanation or footnote may be more honest than replacing a term whose cultural meaning would otherwise disappear.

These choices do not divide translation into rigid categories of "art" for literature and "skill" for practical texts. Even a manual needs a readable sentence, and a poem requires close research. My answer is that translation uses trained skills to make responsible creative decisions within the limits of a brief, a text and its audience.

For a related example of how a translator weighs cultural references in a literary text, read translation strategies in Bokko-chan.