Translation/copywriting/rewriting into the target language

Your words won’t be wasted.

Soseki Natsume, widely considered the father of modern Japanese literature, was a professor of English before becoming a novelist.
One day in class, he gave a copy of an English novel to his students and assigned them to translate it. Days later one of them returned with a question. The novel featured a scene in which a man confesses his love to a woman with the words “I love you,” and this scene puzzled the student: “How can I translate, ‘I love you?’”
The student translated the line, but he felt his word-for-word translation wasn’t quite working. At that time in Japan, there was a word equivalent to the word “love,” but it wasn’t used verbally to express one’s love.
How would you translate “I love you?”
Soseki pondered this question, and then after a long pause, he said, “The translation should read something like, ‘The moon looks beautiful (tonight, doesn’t it?).’”

This anecdote illustrates how difficult translation is. How can written communication in one language targeting the readers who speak another language be simple when words often fail to communicate even between two people who speak the same language?
In the translation process, much of the original text is destined to be compromised. Your words will be replaced with foreign words: This means that the translated version of your text will be a variation of the original. There may be a word that just doesn’t translate, and so the word might need to be explained by a paragraph if it’s crucial to the writer’s purpose. There may also be words that are better off unsaid or that need to be added to the translated version of the text. There may even be words that should be replaced with words that may seem irrelevant and not equivalent. This happens because of cultural linguistic differences. English is considered a strictly grammar-oriented language, whereas Japanese is a grammatically flexible language—and on top of that, Japanese comes with a preference for vague, indirect, and nuance-oriented approaches, by which people intentionally leave out subjects, objects, and often, even verbs.

Translators are constantly faced with a dilemma: Should I respect the words, or should I respect the piece’s soul itself?
While it’s true that there are many cases in which the original text calls for a simple word-for-word translation, there are also cases in which translated text fails to communicate what the writer really desired to express, often resulting in confusion for the reader. While there are things you can only convey by translating a phrase word-for-word, there are some things that you can only convey by “making an interpretive leap” and translating the equivalent of “I love you,” into “The moon looks beautiful.”
Soseki, based on his analysis and interpretation of the piece, must have chosen the latter with the intention of respecting the choices the author of the novel had made about the male protagonist’s character as well as the character’s intention behind the love confession.

“But that’s not translation,” you may say.
When even the choices of words and phrases that the writer has made are all gone, can that still be called translation? The answer is, “Whatever works best to serve the writer’s purpose and intention.”
You may call it translating, or copywriting, or rewriting in the target language. The sound and the melody will be gone and the order of sentences may need to be reversed, but the writer’s voice remains—it will not be a complete word-for-word translation of the original version, but the words in the translated version will magically and perfectly communicate everything the writer intended to communicate to the reader. As long as what the writer intended to convey is understood by the reader in the way the writer intended it to be understood, then it is still the writer’s work—if your translator/copywriter/rewriter understands the writer’s theme, purpose and intention, knows how to interpret the written words as well as the unwritten, and knows how to rewrite in the target language, then the translation will be an honest one.