Nothing really matters (?)...

#1:Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug.

-  This translation is the least descriptive of the four. It is very simplistic diction and doesn't paint a very good image for the reader. All we know as readers was the fact he was sleeping restlessly and when he woke up he was a big bug. It sounded more like a statement than a description of what happened. The second thing I took notice of was the fact his name was spelled differently than any of the other translations. This could be done with the intention of making Gregory more of a child than an adult, or the fact "gregory" is more of an American name than "Gregor",  but what I found through this was that this translation was probably less reliable than any of the others. This one reminds me most of the Stranger, because it is so short, like most of the syntax found in the Stranger.

#2. When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning he found he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug. 

- I thought this translation was more detailed and we as readers now know what he looks like but with no connotation to influence the reader into thinking it was bad or good. the sentence is very smooth and easy to read. By starting out the sentence with the word 'when' this already alludes the reader into believing something was going to happen to Gregor. The words 'troubled dreams' provides a constructive image of what his dreams were like. This makes the reader picture Gregor in bed restlessly sleeping. This sentence structure uses a cause and effect structure type, by giving a reason for him turning into a bug. Lastly, I noticed there was no coma after the word 'morning' and although it didn't impact the sentence that much it made me think that this person was trying to sound as close to the original as possible. 

 #3:As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

- Like the translation above, this one provided enough detail for the reader to paint a picture of a man moving around in bed with a troubled look on his face. The word 'gigantic' also helped in making an image in my head because it is such a strong word choice. I thought the use of the word 'insect' rather than the word bug added more formality to the sentence. The sentence again flows well, but this time I feel it flows more as an active description of when he awoke. When I read this translation I felt a more uneasiness for Gregor. The words 'found himself' make it seem like he was lost and he was now just coming back into his true form. 

#4:One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.

- This is the most descriptive translation out of the four, and it is also the most formal. This is shown through the use of the words 'agitated', 'monstrous', 'transformed', and 'vermin'. What caught my eye was the use of the word 'vermin', because it is the most specific and it makes the reader picture a hideous bug instead of something less vile. This portrayed the transformation as something bad. The next word that caught my eye was 'monstrous' and this is because monstrous sounds like something mean and ugly, not big, which evokes the feeling that this transformation is bad. The use of commas made the sentence choppier than the rest and harder to read. It made it into a much longer sentence and it is very disliking. 

QUESTION ANALYSIS 

As we see in all writing small, simplistic words can have a huge impact on the meaning of a sentence, or the feeling it evokes in the readers. In the translations above, a shift in a single word leads readers to interpret one author’s translation differently than another. When the diction is simplistic, as seen in words like “woke” and “bug” in the first translation, the resulting simple syntax and imagery leads readers to interpret the sentence as statement-like, and a picture is  very hard to form in the mind. The author (who makes the statement from a third-person POV) appears detached from the action. Thus, the meaning readers draw from the first translation is that Gregory’s transformation doesn't have much of an impact. Oppositely, we see the word-choice in the second and third translations, where prepositional clauses like “as” and “when” are used, creating an active description of Gregor’s transformation. This could make the reader feel like the transformation means more than it really does.
      I would say that, in the different choices of diction, syntax, and imagery within the translations above, the most effective is the third translation. This is because its diction is descriptive but does not bear any strong connotations that will influence us. Also, its syntax and structure read well. However, this exercise, as well as the article “Lost in Translation”, highlights the difficulty of translating a text and two consequences of there being a variety of translations. The first is positive and that is because we must always assume ‘our’ translation is different from others, we will more consistently look for bias. The second is from “Lost in Translation” and is negative. It shows that the first line can influence how we interpret tone in the rest of the book. So, different translations, like the fourth one portraying Gregor’s transformation as negative, can lead to readers interpreting the entire story differently.