On the Virtues of Faithfulness

It is one of the acknowledged delights of a literary text reader to get what the author means and in which ways s/he conveys the meaning. When a literary text is not in its original language, the whole responsibility of fulfilling such a desire is the translator's who must remain faithful to the original text as much as possible and provide the reader with what's supposed to be the author speaking in the target language by avoiding the mere explanation of what the author might have said.
Here is what makes translation a complicated and delicate task. On the one hand, it is not desirable to read a text which is hardly understandable because of the violations in the target language structures occurred as a result of the translator's overfaithfulness to the original language, e.g. misplacements of nouns and adjectives. On the other hand, it is undeniable that, when it comes to a literary work, every single word and the way it is employed in the text has its own significance in the creation of that piece of art. A translator, then, has to carry the content and form, keep the specific tone and preserve the diction of the author while minding the structures of the target language. Consequently, there must be a balance between a translator's efforts to produce a smooth and natural text for the target language reader and his/her attempts to be accurate and faithful to the original text. Otherwise there will be no room for the aesthetic pleasure one expects to experience while reading a literary work.

According to what was said, a literary translator needs to be highly skilled, sophisticated, smart, and aesthetically intelligent, because his/her misinterpretations inevitably leads to false impressions on the reader. No matter how minor the misleading impression may appear to be, it is absolutely destructive for a reader's general understanding of a piece of writing.

Although it may be easier for some incompetent translators to interpret the original texts and write them in their own words (which might also look easy for a naïve reader), it is a great betrayal to the splendid world of literature, leaving its lovers in a cruel ignorance.