MCAT content library / CARS reading & reasoning / CARS passage walkthrough: translation and meaning
Distinguish a concession from a recommendation and follow what a phrase contributes to the author’s argument.
About 18 minutes, including the worked examples and checks.
Useful foundations
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Read for the decision the author is defending
This original passage is self-contained. Use its claims and examples rather than outside knowledge of translation. The exercise follows the AAMC emphasis on comprehension, analysis, and extension of supplied text.1
Read the passage, then attempt the four checks before using the walkthrough below if you want an initial independent attempt.
Original passage: the translator’s fingerprints
1. A publisher once proposed a reassuring rule for translation: choose the closest dictionary equivalent for every word, preserve the order whenever grammar permits, and allow the original to speak without interference. The proposal deserves more respect than advocates of creative translation sometimes grant it. A translator who changes whatever seems awkward can quietly replace an unfamiliar author with a familiar one. A visible correspondence between words offers readers a way to challenge that substitution. Yet a useful protection against arbitrariness is not necessarily a complete account of fidelity. The rule assumes that the original speaks through individual words independently of the relations those words acquire in a particular passage.
2. Consider an imagined poem in which a host calls a locked door a “generous threshold.” In the poem’s language, the ordinary word translated as generous also suggests effortless abundance; its collision with the locked door makes the host’s praise faintly absurd. Suppose the nearest dictionary equivalent in the receiving language usually describes personal kindness. A literal rendering might invite the reader to admire the host’s intentions rather than question them. A less literal word could restore the collision but lose the suggestion of abundance. Neither translator can carry every feature across intact. The relevant question is which relationship the passage asks the word to sustain, and what a particular choice preserves at the expense of something else.
3. One might therefore replace fidelity to wording with fidelity to effect: make the new reader feel what the original reader felt. This alternative recognizes a real limitation of the publisher’s rule, but it promises another kind of impossible transparency. Readers within the original language may disagree about whether the host is ridiculous, pitiable, or merely conventional. Even if one response predominated, reproducing it by any available means could license the insertion of judgments the poem never made. A translator could announce that the host is a hypocrite and reliably provoke disapproval. The resulting response might be similar to one reader’s response to the poem, while the reader’s route to it would be entirely different.
4. A responsible translation must consequently defend its decisions without pretending to abolish them. Sometimes a brief note can identify a verbal ambiguity; sometimes a pair of alternative renderings can make a consequential tradeoff visible. Neither device is costless. A note may interrupt a poem, and alternatives can burden a reader who came for one sustained experience. But rejecting every explanatory device because it disturbs the illusion of an unmediated voice gives that illusion more authority than it deserves. The translator need not turn each line into a seminar. The choices that materially alter a passage’s relations should, however, remain open to examination.
5. This account does not place literal and inventive translators on opposite moral sides. A close verbal correspondence may be exactly the right decision in one passage and a serious distortion in another. Nor does it require readers to accept every choice merely because a translator explains it. Explanations expose a decision to criticism; they do not excuse it. Fidelity is better treated as an accountable relationship to a work than as the disappearance of the person translating it. The translator’s achievement is not to leave no fingerprints, but to make the important ones legible enough that another reader can ask whether they belong there.
Worked reading: follow the two rejected shortcuts
The author begins by granting a benefit to close word matching: it makes arbitrary substitutions easier to challenge. That concession prevents the later criticism from becoming a blanket rejection of literal translation. Paragraph 2 then gives a case in which a dictionary match can change the relation between a description and its object. The example tests the adequacy of the proposed rule.
Paragraph 3 performs a second test. If matching words is insufficient, matching a reader’s emotion may look attractive. The author shows why that replacement also fails: readers differ, and a similar response can be produced through a different interpretive route. The contrast matters. The author is evaluating two proposed standards rather than simply choosing the second because the first has a limitation.
For a paragraph-function question, use the 5P sequence. Prioritize the requested role. Paraphrase paragraph 3 as “the apparent alternative has its own defect.” Prognose an answer describing a complication to the emerging solution. Pick the choice that matches that function. In the Post-mortem, identify whether a rejected choice confused the author’s example, concession, or final recommendation.
Carry the qualifications into the conclusion
Paragraphs 4 and 5 defend accountable choices and preserve several limits: notes have costs, not every line needs an explanation, close wording can be appropriate, and an explanation does not make a decision correct. A main-idea answer should retain that qualified position. An answer stating that every translation requires extensive annotations would expand the recommendation beyond the text.
For a new example, preserve the relationship between a work, a consequential interpretive choice, and a way to evaluate that choice. Surface resemblance to poetry is less important than that structure. A choice about translating a play could fit; a claim that every performance should generate the same emotion would revive a standard the author has already criticized.2
ACTIVE PRACTICE · CARS ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
Trace Two Rejected Shortcuts to the Author’s Position
Use only the original five-paragraph translation passage above. For each paragraph, identify the role its reasoning plays. A concession is not necessarily the author’s final recommendation.
Reveal the Five-Paragraph Map
- The author grants literal correspondence a protective function, then limits it.
- The “generous threshold” example shows a possible distortion of relational meaning.
- Faithfulness to a particular emotional response is tested and also found inadequate as a complete rule.
- Important translation decisions should be defensible and open to scrutiny, recognizing the cost of explanatory devices.
- The conclusion favors accountable interpretive decisions rather than a translator’s disappearance or immunity from criticism.
This teaching map does not substitute for the original four passage questions. Answer them independently to test transfer.
Check your reasoning
Choose an answer before opening its feedback. Each option explains the reasoning behind that choice.
Check 1
Which statement best captures the author’s central position?
A. Close verbal correspondence should determine translation choices whenever grammatical structure permits it.
Review this choice. The author grants this policy a protective role but shows that it can distort a relationship within the passage.
B. Faithful translation requires defensible choices whose consequential tradeoffs remain open to criticism.
Correct. The final two paragraphs defend accountability while recognizing unavoidable tradeoffs and allowing criticism of the decisions.
C. A translation should reproduce the response most common among readers of the original work.
Review this choice. Paragraph 3 argues that matching responses can conceal a different route to the response and is not an adequate standard.
D. Readers should accept interpretive changes when translators disclose their personal intentions.
Review this choice. Disclosure enables evaluation; the final paragraph explicitly denies that an explanation excuses every choice.
The principle to carry forward
A main-idea answer must include the conclusion and preserve the limits the author places on it.
Check 2
In the final sentence, making the translator’s “fingerprints” legible most nearly means:
A. Demonstrating that the translated work contains no departures from dictionary meanings.
Review this choice. The author has rejected the claim that word correspondence can eliminate intervention.
B. Displaying the translator’s distinctive style prominently enough to become part of the work.
Review this choice. The passage advocates accountability, not the prominence of the translator’s personal style.
C. Making important interpretive interventions understandable enough for readers to evaluate.
Correct. Fingerprints represent the translator’s consequential choices; legibility makes those choices available for criticism.
D. Restoring every verbal association lost when a work enters another language.
Review this choice. The imagined poem establishes that some features may be lost, even in a responsible rendering.
The principle to carry forward
Interpret a metaphor by the surrounding argument, including what the author says the proposed practice accomplishes.
Check 3
Why does the author describe a translator explicitly calling the host a hypocrite?
A. To establish that the host’s moral character is the poem’s only subject.
Review this choice. The example concerns a method of producing a response, not an exclusive statement about the poem’s subject.
B. To show that explanatory notes invariably spoil a reader’s emotional response.
Review this choice. It occurs in the criticism of effect matching, before the separate discussion of notes and their costs.
C. To demonstrate that a response can be reproduced while changing how the reader reaches it.
Correct. Directly inserting the judgment can produce disapproval while replacing the original passage’s indirect route.
D. To recommend a clearer judgment when an original passage permits disagreement.
Review this choice. The author uses this intervention to expose a problem with the proposed standard, not to endorse it.
The principle to carry forward
An example’s function depends on the claim it is used to test.
Check 4
An editor modernizes an old play. Which practice most closely fits the author’s recommendation?
A. Explain a changed line that alters a central ambiguity, while allowing readers to dispute that change.
Correct. This preserves the focus on consequential interpretive choices and makes the decision accountable without declaring it immune to criticism.
B. Keep every original word even when its present meaning reverses the dramatic contrast.
Review this choice. Mechanical preservation can change the relationships the passage is concerned with, just as in the imagined poem.
C. Replace ambiguous scenes with explicit judgments until audiences report the intended emotion.
Review this choice. This repeats the effect-matching shortcut criticized in paragraph 3.
D. Treat the editor’s published explanation as sufficient proof that every modernization is faithful.
Review this choice. The author distinguishes exposing a choice to evaluation from automatically justifying it.
The principle to carry forward
Transfer the author’s principle with its qualifications, not merely a shared topic or vocabulary.
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Related lessons
- CARS Argument Analysis: Follow the Author’s Position
- CARS main idea: finding the claim and its limits
- CARS analogies and application: transferring the author’s principle
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