I'm not saying it's bad, but it's bad for me. It might be bad for you too. If you turned all this inside out, you'd get what I think of as "good" translation. (A lot of my thinking here is based on Antoine Berman, as applied by me to the translation of the Suites by Jerome R.)
1. It's "creative," but its creativity tends not to produce anything of actually creative value. The translator feels the need to "show his work," by putting in things irrelevant to the original.
2. It adds and subtracts. It tends to be wordier, more pleonastic and redundant than the original (do you see what I've done there?), but also inexplicably leaves things out. Rothenberg, for example, will often leave off the definite article when both Spanish and English need it idiomatically. We would say "The river is high," not "River is high."
3. It is unidiomatic in the target language, but often not in any way that serves the original either.
4. It obscures the structure of the original. It has enjambment that seems gratuitous, for example. Couplets will become tercets.
5. It is not a respecter of tropes. If the original uses chiasmus or asyndeton, the translation will simply ignore the tropes and translate the meaning.
6. It is insensitive to the poetics of the original. It standardizes everything, makes everything sound the same.
7. It lack real conviction or consistency.
8. It justifies a lot of this by appeals to sophisticated theories of translation. Any complaints will be dismissed as an adherence to outmoded theories, excessive literalism, or the denial of the rights of the translator to be "creative" or "free." The translator might cite Walter Benjamin or Lawrence Venuti.
Sure, translation theory is valuable and interesting in its own right, but there is not one overarching theory that should govern all practices.
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