How many books get carried over to another language only to suffer a cruel death by translation? I remember having read Catcher in the Rye in Russian when I was in college. It barely touched me, because the text wasn't alive, it was bland like semolina porridge. I heard similar accounts from English speaking people who tried reading Russian proze. I guess this becomes more if a problem when the context of the translated book is unfamiliar to the new readers. Anyways, Catcher in the Rye in English is well-written and engaging from the page one.
Some English authors did shine even in translation. I could think of Wells, Conan Doyle, Vonnegut, Mark Twain and a few others. Or they were lucky to be about either historical times or about fictional setup. Pratchett has been ruined for me too, but Zelazny or Tolkien weren't. Perhaps because Pratchett was more satire than fantasy, and that sature was grounded in the context I had no clue about back then?
This seems to be less if an issue for some other languages/cultures; I rarely got annoyed at German, Polish or Czech translations I have read. Translated poetry is often terrible, but luckily, in Russia it wasn't uncommon when some great poet did it and produced if not a full match for the original, then at least an impressive remake in its own right - so some of the English poetry came across somehow, thanks to Boris Pasternak and others.
Will machine translation ever win over human translation? Could it become a perfect magic mirror? Do we even know how a perfect translation should look like? Till that time, getting access to the original works is one of the compelling reasons to learn about other languages and cultures. May be if more people did that, less people would get time and energy for violent conflicts of any kind. One can always dream.
