What makes a translation great?

I came here to mention this book also. I learned a lot. He explores a mind numbing number of properties which are potentially in the mix. They depend in turn on the properties of the source material. (Authors play all kinds of games with meter and structure and arbitrary constraints - and preserving some can come at the cost of deprecating others.)

One warning: among the genuinely deep insights, Hofstadter can occasionally come off as smug and self-congratulatory about his own poetic genius. I found this rather off-putting - and surprising since I found the tone of G.E.B. rather more like enthusiastic play.

>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care

As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).

The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.

The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!

I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it clearly though. Does anyone else feel the same and maybe knows what causes it?

Note: Am/was an amateur translator.

I dislike translation notes. Translations are already a form of notes, so appending notes to notes is just bad form.

Some translations can be so awkward or simply impossible that leaving a translation note becomes inevitable, but a good translator should not have to need them everywhere.

Except for the search-replace error (The Impresario on the Train!)