#WritersCoffeeClub 9. Do you subscribe to 'show, don't tell?' Why, or why not?

No, at least for what _I_ am writing about.

Consider this: I translate old German folk tales which were written down in the 19th century. The audience for these tales were the immediate family and neighbors of the storytellers. Thus, they had the same intense awareness of the local cultural, historical, and geographic context.

My readers generally do _not_ have this awareness. A lot of the stuff in these tales would be hard to understand even for modern-day Germans, so what chance does an international audience have?

So while I try to translate the actual tales as faithfully as possible, I must also tell my audience about this context so that they can understand them.

And as an aside, this is one of the major reasons why I do not use #LLM translations. Even if such models _could_ faithfully translate from my sources (which I doubt), they would probably make a huge mess of explaining the context of these tales. And my audience deserves better.