I need help with this text; how to analyze it critically?

hello,everyone!
How can i analyze critically the following text?please help,i need some ideas!!

There is a general idea that a translation always fails to preserve some of the qualities that distinguish the original work — i.e., that 'something always gets lost in translation.' Writers, critics, and the general reading public unthinkingly accept this clichè. But this belief is unwarranted: translators are sometimes distinguished authors themselves, and some authors may even translate their own works. As the translator pointed out in the preface to an English version of Dante's works, the violin and the piano make different sounds, but they can play what is recognizably the same piece of music.

thanks!:)

I read your text and believe it means that even though a translator is thought to translate things and that translating does not perverse the original text for an example if you translate Chinese to English the understanding will not be the same. So this text is saying that the translators don't always lose the meaning in translations. Sometimes they might make a piece of writing and translate their writing to make it simpler. This text relates this idea that translators do sometimes preserve the ideas to Dante's work. Dante's work was translated in English and the preface explained that this translation is generally valid and preserves the core idea of the text.

There is a relation of Dante's preface in his translated works to the ideas about translators and this reference to Dante is used to support the idea that the text made in the beginning the often translated things can have same meaning but different writing which in this text is compared and contrasted to a violin and piano which are two different instruments still have the same music.


Please reply back if you don't understand something.

Thanks a lot, i can now understand what the author is trying to say and that is great, cause i didn't have a clue about the Dante's preface.But still i have to detect in this text the claims, the conclusions, the undelying assumptions and the rhetorical fallacies.Do you think this text has internal clarity & consistency; logical consistency; logical order or is it inconsistent? And if you can come up with an answer to the following question related to this text, i would be very grateful!
What alternative explanations and counterexamples can I think of?
What additional evidence might weaken or strengthen the claims?
What changes in the argument would make the reasoning more sound?

thanks,it was very kind of you to help me!

You can have a great time analyzing that statement. When you analyze a statement, it is all about scrutinizing it, criticizing it.

This statement is not unwarranted, and people who are wise to the fact that meaning is lost in translation are NOT "unthinking."

First of all, even when I "translate" my own thoughts into words, some of my meaning is lost before they even get written on the page! Second, even when a translator is a "distinguished author," that still does not give them access to the original writer's thoughts! Third, even when the original writer does the translating, some meaning is lost, because language is not perfect.

James Masayoshi Mitose wrote: "Words are a difficult means of communication."