As someone bilingual in Russian and English, I have to say that translating between the two languages is quite hard.
* English has a fixed word order: "man bites dog" != "dog bites man". Russian allows words to be reordered, phrases split and interleaved, to achieve the desired emphasis, flow, or emotional impact.
* English has a flexible information structure: the topic and the focus can be in any order. In literary Russian, the information structure is fixed: the focus goes at the end of the phrase.
* The English verb system (emphasizing the relative order of events) and Russian verb system (emphasizing the aspect and manner of action) map rather poorly onto each other in either direction.
* One language may require a positive statement where the other requires a negative statement - and vice versa, with no general pattern. Compare English "the best movie ever" and the Russian equivalent "лучше фильма не видел" (literally, "a better movie [than this one] I have not seen")...
* Technical English loves to agglutinate random roots together to make a new word. Unpacking and serializing the result in Russian typically results in something long, awful, and bureaucratic-sounding.
* Russian loves hard-to-translate impersonal statements (следует, нельзя), and its system of diminutives/augmentatives doesn't have a nice correspondence in English.
* It is very often difficult to find a translation that matches both the intended meaning and the "feel" (positive, negative, common, unusual, colloquial, old-fashioned, scientific) of a word.
And that's even before you attempt to replicate a particular poetic rhyme and meter in a language less well suited for it.
* English has a fixed word order: "man bites dog" != "dog bites man". Russian allows words to be reordered, phrases split and interleaved, to achieve the desired emphasis, flow, or emotional impact.
* English has a flexible information structure: the topic and the focus can be in any order. In literary Russian, the information structure is fixed: the focus goes at the end of the phrase.
* The English verb system (emphasizing the relative order of events) and Russian verb system (emphasizing the aspect and manner of action) map rather poorly onto each other in either direction.
* One language may require a positive statement where the other requires a negative statement - and vice versa, with no general pattern. Compare English "the best movie ever" and the Russian equivalent "лучше фильма не видел" (literally, "a better movie [than this one] I have not seen")...
* Technical English loves to agglutinate random roots together to make a new word. Unpacking and serializing the result in Russian typically results in something long, awful, and bureaucratic-sounding.
* Russian loves hard-to-translate impersonal statements (следует, нельзя), and its system of diminutives/augmentatives doesn't have a nice correspondence in English.
* It is very often difficult to find a translation that matches both the intended meaning and the "feel" (positive, negative, common, unusual, colloquial, old-fashioned, scientific) of a word.
And that's even before you attempt to replicate a particular poetic rhyme and meter in a language less well suited for it.