I found languages that are distant (English - Chinese) are generally harder to translate, and languages that are closer are much easier (English - Dutch, Chines

I found languages that are distant (English - Chinese) are generally harder to translate, and languages that are closer are much easier (English - Dutch, Chinese - Korean). Some people are against translation, some people are okay with it, but it mostly boils down to the meaning of the text itself and the two languages that people are working with. Things are easier to translate: 1) describe something objective like scientific fact or mechanism like "water is made up by hydrogen and oxygen" 2) communicate with commands like "pass me that bottle of water". It's possible to translate legal documents or business requirements faithfully if the translator knows the two of the language really well. Things are hard to translate: 1) Puns: "Nothing right is left, and nothing left is right". 2) Aesthetics: Chinese people especially love to use the word "big/great/grand", it can be beautiful in Chinse but usually sounds awkward in English. 3) Contexts: like many Chinese people today would still use a lot of ancient idioms, which is a compact four-character format that describes an ancient story that happened millennials ago, and they're referring to the moral of those stories. Korean also use a lot of those idioms which make things much easier to translate. 4) Culture: This is the key difference, everybody knows it but it's always more than I assumed. Say there's a talk from a successful person talking about his experience - an American would probably focus on how hardworking he/she was, while a Chinese would very likely focus on rendering the bitterness he/she has encountered during the process (it has something to do with the Eastern Asian Buddhism background, and takes a lot of footnotes to make things clear to the Western audience). At the end of the day, it's not the languages that are different - it's the things that people talking about that are different.