September 2016 LSAT Section 1 Question 19

Any literary translation is a compromise between two goals that cannot be entirely reconciled: faithfulness to the me...

Melody on January 11, 2021

Answer choice D and E

I ruled out answer choice D because I interpreted "Any translation that is not entirely faithful to both the meaning of the text and the original author's style..." as saying that it is possible to be entirely faithful to both meaning and original style. Whereas, in the stimulus is says that it is basically impossible to be faithful to both of them. Please help clarify where I went wrong.

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shunhe on January 14, 2021

Hi @Melody,

Thanks for the question! Well, notice that the stimulus is talking about “literary” translations specifically. There might be other kinds of translations where you don’t need to compromise between the two goals. For example, translating old business documents or something. So (D) is about “any translation,” whereas the stimulus is about “any literary translation.” So it’s possible that translations could be faithful to both, but literary translations cannot.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.