Found in Translation

I have spent most of my first month of intern-ship at Seagull Publications proofreading English translations of collections of Mahasweta Devi's stories as well as a couple of plays by Catherine Filloux. About Mahasweta Devi's stories- I was told that they were being revised for a worldwide publication. Therefore I would have to keep a lookout for native and colloquial words which would need footnotes.
The stories translated by the likes of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ipsita Chanda are mostly about tribal and rural Bengal and that too of bygone eras. Coming across words like 'Milk-Mother', 'daughter-in-law sister' and 'Lion-seated goddess' among many others, I felt that they were not sounding right- that something was being lost in translation. I realized that such phrases cannot be translated without losing their essence. This must be a major problem faced by any translator. Further as a Bengali I myself cannot relate to the local dialects of the rural and adivasi characters. That dialect once translated is twice removed from me. A reader to whom Bengali is a foreign language would be thrice removed from the nuances of the language. What is then to be done to overcome this hurdle?
The eventual aim or objective of language is communication- the eternal conflict of the what and how. The reader must then learn to apprehend truth through active imaginative empathy. The appreciation of such words in terms of the mot juste is fallacious. Hence the act of reading must be revised. And the word shouldn't be the doorway to understanding but the key with which you must open the door yourself. Its as if in earlier narratives the reader was a mere spectator and the author was a virtuoso magician who would conjure up a door out of thin air and make us see things through that doorway which have no basis in reality. But now the reader has to go up on stage himself,only nudged on by the author.
A case in point would be Catherine Filloux's play 'Eyes of the Heart'. It is about Cambodian refugees settled in the US who are still trying to come to terms with the atrocities inflicted on them during the Pol Pot regime. Here too I noticed clusters of words sticking out because they were translations of native words. But it is the spirit of the play that mattered and I could identify with the issues raised through 'active imaginative empathy'. My observation is that whether it is a translated work or a work influenced heavily by native rituals and colloquialisms- it requires involvement on the part of the reader which cuts across barriers of culture and language.