The point is not to show off how clever you are, it's to make the best possible finished product. The people who need the translation aren't going to be checking how close the jokes are to the original material. They're going to care how funny the jokes are.
ADBOC. The point, when you are a translator, is to translate. The criterion for "best" includes how close the translation is to the original. And cleverness is something that you brought up out of the blue, a non sequitur in the context - I reject (and resent) the implication that I approve of showing off.
Someone whose book I translated once told me: "It's my name that will be on the cover, so your job is to write what I would have written if I'd been French." Another way to say this is: if all you care about is how funny the jokes are,...
We're currently translating chapter 11 into German. It's going along fine, but
is still puzzling us. No dictionary entries, no HPMoR-unrelated search hits, nothing…
Is this some kind of dadaist joke by Eliezer? Or are we missing something?