Translation is a tricky endeavour, and you can easily spot the problems if you happen to know both the language of the original text and of the translation, as it happened for me in the case of Diary by my favourite Polish intellectualist, Witold Gombrowicz, which I have in two editions, original and translated into English, and frankly, I’m not particularly fond of the latter.
This particular text aside, it’s one thing if the root of the problem lies in semantic equivalence, but it’s something else entirely if contortions, whether accidental or intentional, come into play, as in the quotation from Cicero’s Tusculanæ Disputationes that I found in The Essays of Montaigne—Volume 05 by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton. “Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam literis, persequuti sunt.” is translated as “They have proceeded to this discipline of living well, which of all arts is the greatest, by their lives, rather than by their reading.”
Apart from the fact that in the original this is not an independent sentence but the conclusion of a longer one, it has misspelt two words since the original text is “hanc amplissimam omnium artium, bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam litteris persecuti sunt.” (Tusculanae Disputationes, M. Tullius Cicero, M. Pohlenz, Leipzig, 1918), and in translation by Charles Duke Yonge, for example, it reads as follows: “yet promoted this most extensive of all arts, the principle of living well, even more by their life than by their writings.”
Someone might accuse me of nitpicking details, but I see fundamental differences between “proceeded” and “promoted”, and “their reading” and “their writings”.
