ILLOGICAL SCENARIOS IN FAILED TRANSLATION WORK
I don’t know about you but it’s easy for me to believe that, when someone has started learning a foreign language for the first time, and learning how to express certain simple yet true facts in it (and, maybe, even themselves i.e. personal opinions and reasoning, eventually) with gradually increasing confidence, chances are that they would love to believe that the only possible errors they could make in a new language as they do so would be ones that would (normally) be found automatically by an expert in the language, such as they could only aspire to be (certainly if they were a native speaker). This includes spelling and grammatical errors, but by no means exclusively those things. An unusual choice of word, for example, will stand out like a sore thumb in anything formal which is supposed to be taken on good authority, even if it might be easy for some people to spot it, or indeed suggest a better substitute for it.
But if you’re genuinely determined to do your best to translate something to the best of your ability while knowing you’re struggling with impaired confidence and / or lack of knowledge and / or confusion pertinent to whatever you’re writing about based on what you have seen in the original and interpreted from it, you may well be feeling a need to brace yourself for trying to explain yourself for reasons for which there is simply no ready-made categorisation. That said, at the very least, I would certainly implore you to be on your guard against inadvertently writing anything which hints at random circumstances (even if they are circumstances which many would agree you just could not make up; or, some might say, perhaps especially so) which are not only false and inaccurate and utterly irrelevant in relation to the content of the original material; they would simply count as self-invalidating in real life, and any question as to whether or not anyone knows any specific anything in relation to the situation at hand would be pointless, like in cartoons where a character walks off a cliff then doesn’t fall until they realise that they are not standing on anything. Look at outputs obtained from backmasking: their wholly unpredictable amusement factor aside, it is not hard for a reasonably intelligent and mature person to dismiss them quickly and, I hasten to add, forget about them quickly given their blatant nonsense factor the moment they decide to stop watching it and move on.
But I digress. No-one likes ending up feeling forced to seek out reasoning to explain a given situation – or, as the case may be, “seeking it in” i.e. seeking to come to terms with their very understanding of it within themselves, which means coming to understand exactly why they think a certain way – certainly if they would believe (probably subconsciously) that if someone were to take the time to explain it to them, there would still be a good chance that they would still be left unable to rearticulate it with conviction in their own wording, simply because of lack of knowledge of certain facts, that is, facts which have possibly indisputably been concluded but, for all the suggestion that they are true – and this may well be supported by trustworthy evidence (readily provided or not) and made in good faith – could in themselves be misleading as a result of said facts being a product of an honest mistake or something like that.
You see, it’s not purely as simple as being on your guard against inadvertently writing anything which hints at random circumstances which are not only false and inaccurate in relation to the content of the original material but which simply couldn’t happen in real life; for savvy writers know how not to write copy which paints a picture of a situation which (truly) doesn’t make sense in that, while it’s easy enough to understand what someone else wants others to understand about it without a requirement for debate about it, it’s not logical; truth be told, if the expression “common sense” means anything, such a situation should never actually be accepted uncritically or considered credible in real life (or logical) come what may. An example of this follows in the next paragraph.
I used to watch the Raggy Dolls all the time when I was young. In this episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8VCaP9Xi9g why is it that the Raggy Dolls never seem to believe that, eventually, Mr. Grimes will unpack his suitcase only to find them inside? Then what? I mean, the only reason Mr. Grimes never knows about them being in his suitcase and going on this holiday all this time is because of certain circumstances which are strictly decided on by the author of the story. “I’ll leave the unpacking until after lunch as I’m feeling a bit peckish.” (4:23) Did the Raggy Dolls actually expect this development, or anything equivalent, to occur eventually? (There are no clues to suggest that they did, you know.) Mr. Grimes didn’t decide on that; the author of the story did. Come on!
Basically, savvy writers consider the factor of credibility / logic that will be attributed to how they put stuff. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what professional translation is all about.