Any literary translator will readily confess that a certain (0) INFIDELITY (FIDELITY) to the source text is not merely inevitable but, on occasion, artistically desirable. The most 1IDIOM turns of phrase rarely travel well across languages, and the translator who clings slavishly to the original risks producing prose that feels wooden to the target reader. 2CULTURE transfer is, by its nature, a delicate business, demanding a 3NUANCE appreciation of what a given expression conveys in its native habitat. Scholars debate endlessly whether 4EQUIVALENT at the level of word, sentence or effect is even an intelligible goal, and different schools favour either overt foreignisation or the quieter 5DOMESTIC of the text into the reader's own conventions. Compounding the difficulty, every translator must guard against outright 6INTERPRET of passages whose ambiguity was deliberate, and against the 7PRESERVE of surface meaning at the cost of tone. Ultimately, the translator's task is less to efface themselves than to negotiate between two 8AUTHOR voices — their own and that of the original writer — in a dialogue that no algorithm can yet replicate.