Translation is a task that requires an interpretation of a whole organization of activity, not just the matching of vocabulary.
Translation is always serving two masters, the foreigner in his strangeness and the reader in his desire for appropriation. Reader.
Translation is an attempt to render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time.
A Translation is a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Translation is a process whereby weaker third world nations are more likely to submit to forcible translation distortions than the other way around.
Translation is a fragile condition, admitting of no verification other than a new translation and thus requiring a kind of 'linguistic hospitality'.
Translation is a task not in the sense of a restricting obligation, but in the sense that it is a thing to be done so that human action can simply continue.
Translation is, for anything worth reading, of no real value except as a crib to the original. As such, translations for the general reader ought to be as literal as possible.