People say something is ‘lost in translation’ so often and so vaguely that the phrase has stopped pointing at anything specific. I want to try to name the specific loss rather than gesture at a general one, because I think the vague version undersells translators and the specific version, if anything, makes their job look harder and more interesting than the vague complaint gives them credit for.
Here’s the specific version: every sentence an author writes is one solution to a problem the language handed them — a particular ambiguity available in that word and not its neighbor, a rhythm that only exists because of where the stressed syllables happen to fall. The author didn’t choose that solution from a menu of equal options in every language at once; they chose it from the menu their specific language offered. A translator has to solve the same underlying problem with a different menu, and the honest fact is that the original menu’s specific dish is very often just not on the new one.
So what’s lost isn’t vaguely ‘something,’ it’s a specific choice the author made that the translator has to remake from different available choices, in a language whose ambiguities fall in different places. Good translation isn’t the impossible feat of transporting the original choice intact. It’s making an equally deliberate choice under a different, and differently constrained, set of options — which is a much higher compliment to pay a translator than ‘faithful,’ and closer to what the good ones are actually doing.