Katharina Rout is one of the translators whose work involves lesser known traditions. She writes about translating contemporary German fiction into English, and more compellingly, about the challenge of translating Tuvan (Mongolian) chief Galsan Tschinag:

Raymundo Isidro Alavez also offers a fascinating account of his work, translating into his mother tongue, Hñähñu, classics from Mexican literature and beyond. Recognizing that “the spoken and written language is a fundamental agent for a culture’s preservation” (“Why Translate into Hñähñu?”, p. 29), he is committed to making his indigenous language available as a written text, preserving its roots, honoring its poetic quality and extending its reach even when the words are not readily available. Undaunted, he says the need to express that for which no word exists “leads me to create new terms from existing grammatical roots, finding in my own language the word’s intonation, pushing the language even further to come up with original expressions” (p. 25).

Regardless of their chosen languages, most translators face the same challenge, as expressed so directly by Medeine Tribenevičius ‘to translate what is written, not what you think should have been written.’

Another supporter of “the preservation and development of indigenous literatures” (“Literary Translation into the Indigenous Languages of the Americas,” p. 112), Enrique Servín Herrera opposes some efforts toward vocabulary expansion. He claims: “Coining new words to fill lexical asymmetries has been a widely used strategy among both translators and writers but has proven dangerous, and has frequently damaged more than helped the promotion of new indigenous literature” (p. 111). For Herrera, though, accepting some loan words and neologisms is a necessary evil, always with the caveat:

Regardless of their chosen languages, most translators face the same challenge, as expressed so directly by Medeine Tribenevičius, “to translate what is written, not what you think should have been written.” (“Not Making It Up: the Translating Writer,” p. 30). Hovering always over any translator is the fear of untranslatabilty, which Suzanne Jill Levine addresses: “A translation will never be the text it imitates, which was written in another language, but it can be… a text illuminated and motivated by the original, realized in its next life, in translation” (“The Subversive Scribe,” p. 88). She recommends we

Strong talk. A similar well-known charge that no anthology on literary translation can ignore is the often-repeated argument traduttore, traditore, that is, translator: traitor! As a former Latin teacher, I used to tell students that on the continuum from literal to literary, I wanted them way down at the literal end; so literal, in fact, that it was no longer English. “Go back to the Latin,” I would urge them. “After you understand the meaning, forget your translation and read the Latin again.” “The fun is in the original,” I’d preach. Deeply satisfying as this approach is, it obviously restricts the amount of material a reader would have access to.

So however traitorous, we need to translate. As Patricia Godbout points out,