A translator must break the original's form, its sounds, wordplay and structure, and rebuild the meaning in a different form. That is why a faithful translator is not a servant copying words but someone who changes the text on purpose. Seeing the translator's choices, instead of hiding them, is how readers understand what they are actually getting.
A translation can never be the text it copies, because that text was written in another language. But it can bring out a version that was lying asleep inside the original and give it life for new readers. Seen this way, a translation is not a faint shadow of a lost original but a new work that the original lights up and drives.
Readers need to know how foreign writing reaches them, and how gaps and overlaps between languages and cultures change what finally arrives. Knowing the other, and noticing the filter through which we receive them, is a basic step toward knowing ourselves.
The neat split between a true original and a lesser translation breaks down in practice. Some writers already treat their own texts as unstable and willing to betray themselves, so the translator ends up working with the author rather than serving them. Translating becomes a shared act of writing between two people.
Because translating means remaking a creative use of language in another tongue, the translator has to write as well as the author did. Carrying over the words is not enough; the translator must carry over a way of seeing and a playful, inventive style. This makes translation intellectual work as serious as criticism, not a clerical task.