The translation that added a footnote

A novel's first sentence contains a pronoun that marks the speaker as younger than the person addressed, and the language it was translated into has no such form. The translator added nine words and a footnote, and was criticised for both.

The problem is not vocabulary. It is that languages encode different things obligatorily. Some require the speaker's relative age or status in every sentence; others require definiteness, or evidentiality — whether the speaker saw the event, heard about it or infers it. When a feature is obligatory in the source and absent in the target, a translator must choose between three bad options: drop the information, state it explicitly in words the author did not use, or add apparatus outside the text.

Each option has a cost that falls somewhere different. Dropping it protects the sentence's rhythm and loses a relationship that the novel spends two hundred pages developing. Stating it changes a thing the original showed into a thing the translation tells, which is a different kind of writing. A footnote keeps both the sentence and the information and reminds the reader, at the first line, that they are reading a translation — which some readers want and most publishers do not.

The criticism the translator received came from both directions, and both critics were describing the cost they minded rather than an error.

There is a general lesson for anyone reading in a second language. The hardest parts of a text are rarely the unfamiliar words, which can be looked up. They are the features the language makes you say — the ones a native speaker cannot leave out and cannot explain, because they have never had the experience of a sentence without them.