I recently watched a Taiwanese YouTube video introducing the German movie Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens, based on the last year of Franz Kafka’s life. Watching a German film discussed in Mandarin felt strangely incongruous—a feeling I associate with the Japanese term Iwakkan (違和感). I experience this because I have always read Kafka, his biographies, and related critical works in English before starting German.

English and German are linguistic “cousins,” sharing many words and concepts. Because of this connection, I instinctively feel that English is the more appropriate language for accessing Kafka’s original German work. After watching the short Mandarin clip, my immediate impulse was to search for information about the movie in German or English.

However, I suspect that by restricting myself to these linguistically related languages, I might be missing something crucial. When Kafka’s work is interpreted and translated into a more culturally disparate language, like Mandarin or Japanese, the expression of his ideas changes. Translators must actively mediate cultural incongruities and conceptual gaps that exist between the source and target cultures.

Observing how these translators handle such concepts reveals fascinating details about cultural limitations and differences. It highlights how translation is not just about words, but about making a foreign experience relatable. This comparison between “cousin” and “disparate” translations is a topic worthy of deep study.

Regardless of the translated version, my resolve remains the same: I want to watch the German original. The few movie clips I heard contained German dialogue that sounded beautiful to me.