Agreed—and this reminds me of the observation that all of physics is contained in a single pebble; with enough undesrstnding, you could infer all of physics from close observation of quantum effects, find gravity at a very small scale if you had sensitive enough instruments, know much of natural history, liked the fact that earth has running water that made the stone smooth, that it must be in a universe more than a certain age given its composition, etc. With enough detail, any facet of a story requires effectively unlimited detail to fully understand.
And that makes it clear that we don’t intend for every translation to be of unlimited depth—but the depth of the translation matters, and we trade off between depth of translation and accuracy. Translating Sherbert Lemon as Lemon Sorbet is probably a lack of understanding and an overly direct literal-but-incorrect meaning, while translating it as Crembo might be a reasonable choice because of the context, but is not at all a literal translation.
Agreed—and this reminds me of the observation that all of physics is contained in a single pebble; with enough undesrstnding, you could infer all of physics from close observation of quantum effects, find gravity at a very small scale if you had sensitive enough instruments, know much of natural history, liked the fact that earth has running water that made the stone smooth, that it must be in a universe more than a certain age given its composition, etc. With enough detail, any facet of a story requires effectively unlimited detail to fully understand.
And that makes it clear that we don’t intend for every translation to be of unlimited depth—but the depth of the translation matters, and we trade off between depth of translation and accuracy. Translating Sherbert Lemon as Lemon Sorbet is probably a lack of understanding and an overly direct literal-but-incorrect meaning, while translating it as Crembo might be a reasonable choice because of the context, but is not at all a literal translation.