I’ll stand by the title here. I think a bilingual person without specific training in translation can have good taste in determining whether or not a given translation is high-quality. These seem like distinct skills, e.g. in English I’m able to recognize a work badly translated from French even if I don’t speak French and couldn’t produce a better one. And having good taste seems like the most important skill for someone who is vetting and contracting with professional translators.
Separately, I also think that many (but not all) bilingual people without specific training in translation can themselves do good translation work. The results of our pilot project moved me towards this view (from a prior position that put a decent amount of weight on it).
As a high-level note, I see the goal here as enabling people to engage with EA ideas where they couldn’t before. It’s important that quality be high enough that the ideas are transmitted with good fidelity. But I don’t think we need to adhere to an extremely high and rigorous standard of the type one might have when translating a literary work, e.g. I don’t think we need translations to read so fluently that one forgets the material was originally written in English. I think this work is urgent and important, and I think the opportunity costs of imposing that kind of standard would be significant.
I’ll stand by the title here. I think a bilingual person without specific training in translation can have good taste in determining whether or not a given translation is high-quality. These seem like distinct skills, e.g. in English I’m able to recognize a work badly translated from French even if I don’t speak French and couldn’t produce a better one. And having good taste seems like the most important skill for someone who is vetting and contracting with professional translators.
Separately, I also think that many (but not all) bilingual people without specific training in translation can themselves do good translation work. The results of our pilot project moved me towards this view (from a prior position that put a decent amount of weight on it).
As a high-level note, I see the goal here as enabling people to engage with EA ideas where they couldn’t before. It’s important that quality be high enough that the ideas are transmitted with good fidelity. But I don’t think we need to adhere to an extremely high and rigorous standard of the type one might have when translating a literary work, e.g. I don’t think we need translations to read so fluently that one forgets the material was originally written in English. I think this work is urgent and important, and I think the opportunity costs of imposing that kind of standard would be significant.