Translation: Its Problems and Prospects

One of the major problems faced by a literary translator is that of maintaining the appropriate mood, tone, purpose, feeling and sense of the original writer. It cannot be denied that finding the exact equivalent of the meaning of the original text is an arduous task. Hence, a translator faces stiff challenges in exploring and maintaining equivalence between the source language text and the target language text and it appears to be one of the core problems of translation. As such, the idea of total translation is a platonic one as the process of translation involves loss of meaning, addition of meaning and skewing of meaning.