Great "Mis-Translation" from Anne Herbert over at Christopher Rizzo's blog.

Though semantically, the idea of a "mistranslation" is sort of strange to me. I understand exactly what Shin Yu and Christopher are talking about, but the concept for me breaks down when one accepts the fact that no translation is perfect; ergo, every translation is a "mistranslation." It's possible to make translations with varying degrees of "static" or "interference," with varying degrees of fidelity to the author's original "intent." But I don't think one can necessarily apply the binary "properly translated" vs. "not properly translated."

My undergraduate thesis at Marlboro College was all about translation. A defense of translation, specifically. The spine of the argument concerned Kristeva's notion that poetic language is a sort of "carnival" (in the let's-kill-the-king sense) where identity, syntax, meaning, gender, etc. are plastic and easily changeable. Things wear the mask of other things. So a translation is just another mask in that sense, there's no reason "meaning" or "intent" need to hold from language to language, since those things are only dubiously defined in the source text, anyway. That's sort of an oversimplification, but you get the idea, hopefully (the paper itself is about 100 pages long (and about 10 years old) so I won't post it here).