His essay about machine translation is quite illustrative of the issues of cultural context as well. Even the best translations lose a substantial chunk of mean

His essay about machine translation is quite illustrative of the issues of cultural context as well. Even the best translations lose a substantial chunk of meaning, because it’s often not just what the author said, but also how he said it, which particular words were used, and subtle other meanings and gradations attached to that particular choice of words (and, in Russian, the word order as well). When I was growing up I read a ton of sci-fi. One of my favorite works is “Stranger in a strange land” by Robert Heinlein. I had two different translations of it. One was good, another one was a turd, and neither came anywhere close to living in the US for 15 years and _then_ re-reading the book in its original form. And that’s sci-fi, a relatively “shallow” literary genre.