ABSTRACT
The important thing to remember is, we do go on. Trained to become ever more suspicious of our “immediate” or “intuitive” understanding of a text to be translated, we doggedly go on believing in our ability eventually to work through to a correct interpretation. Thwarted over and over in our attempts to find a target-language equivalent for a culture-bound and therefore apparently untranslatable word or phrase, we keep sending mental probes out through our own and the Internet’s neural pathways, hoping to turn a corner and stumble upon the perfect translation. It almost never happens. We almost always settle for far less than the best. But we go on questing. It is perhaps our least reasonable, but also most professional, feature.
