Laurel wrote:
A literal translation by itself may be fine for personal understanding, but part of the "art" of translating, for me, is to be able to render the same "meaning" in "modern" language.
 
hi laurel,
this is really an interesting topic, especially when translating from old languages. i do a lot of latin tutoring, and one important task for me is to motivate school children to be interested in latin at all and to discover that it is not all old and dead and dusty. many latin words have come as loanwords into german, and of course the meanings have slowly changed over the ages. so i allow the children to draw connections between the latin words in the textbook or in an original text, and what we use the word for today, and sometimes we get fairly "modern" translations, which show for example that roman politics was much the same sort of business as politics today (this might not always be strictly according to what a historian has to say, but at least it makes latin a bit more fun).
of course i take care of detailed grammar analysis as well. some things cannot be translated literally - and will be wrong if translated literally - because other constructions are in use. so this is a first step, analysing the words of the text closely.
but the second step can include this "art" of translation you speak of, laurel. for me it is also the "fun" of translation ;-) playing with the text, showing what can be in it, how it can be interpreted. of course we should not go too far and destroy the original atmosphere of the text. but i think with old languages we often tend to make the translation sound rather too old-fashioned and boring and well-behaved ;-) and that's not always what's in it. there are some really horrible translations of old norse texts in german, which were done through the 1930s and 40s, of course with a political background, and quite pathetic and long winded. of course they had some heroic ideas about old germans in mind. but actually the style of the old norse literature is quite matter-of-fact, short, direct, and with a subtle poetic vein. this is hard to conserve in a translation. but it's worth a try :-)
mona