Decisions - here are some of the ones I wasn't aware of at first
- Colour - like the highlights in a picture of dried grasses, music, rhythm
- Games - assonance, chaism, parallels, metaphor
- Concordance - glossing, Rules to follow and break, avoidance, discovering your prejudice
- Structure - recurrence, parallels, circles, micro and macro, word pairings, whole phrases and thoughts
- Hearing - unplugging ears and opening eyes to humour, idiom, irony, sarcasm, anger, fear, shame
- Grammar - juxtaposition, conjunctions, prepositions, gender, verbs, pronoun and point of view shifts (especially in poetry), detail of word order, teasing out the details to highlight or let be.
- Audience - If I am reading with an 8 year old, I have a different strategy from reading with teens or more senior citizens. But for all groups, the potential rigidities of soul are the same and one needs to allow, trick, beguile the reader / listener to fill in the gaps. Then the lessons are not lost.
- Policy - theology, government, piety, religious practice, history. What influence is expected from a translation? Do you want to obscure resurrection or enforce the domination of one or other party?
- Elapsed time - did words evolve and morph over the period of composition? This is a question particularly for a long book.
- Meaning and explanation and other heretical thoughts.
What other topics and questions should I consider in an essay on translation. Does the above taxonomy collapse into a smaller number of prismatic surfaces?