When it comes to literature the translator needs to have a sensitivity to the cultural meanings of certain words for the original meaning not to be lost or affected. As a bad example, I read Zola’s The Earth in English, in dialogue the translator had some children in a poor village using words like ‘gosh’ and ‘golly’. These are kind of old fashioned, upper class words in English, and would sound strange coming from peasant children - particularly as the book makes strong class distinctions. 

I think the main goal of a translator is to come up with a translation that has the same general meaning as the original.  If the literal translation makes no sense, then it is reasonable to change it to something that means the same thing in the new language.  I'm not sure that I remember the details exactly, but translating from the Hebrew Bible to English poses a few problems.  Where the text literally says, As a man thinks in his kidneys, I think it is appropriate to change that to As a man thinks in his heart.

A very good translation, in my opinion, is the German version of the first  Harry Potter book.

A fairly bad translation is the Spanish version of the same book.  There were two people working on the Spanish translation, and they still managed to royally screw a few things up. It is obvious that they did not understand the English in a few places.  You just can't find good help these days. :)

The first major mistake is the title of the first chapter:  The Boy Who Lived.  For some unfathomable reason, the translators ignored the meaning of "lived" in English.  It obviously means "survived" in the context of the story.  Spanish has a word that means to survive (supervivir, right?), but they ended up using vivir which makes no sense at all in Spanish.

Later in the story,  when Harry visits Mr. Olivander to buy a wand, the translators completely misunderstand the English.  Mr. Olivander tells Harry something like, "Here, try this wand.  It's nice and flexible."  In English, this construction means  "very flexible in a desirable way."  The translators don't understand this, and they translate it into Spanish as "Here.  Try this wand.  It's nice.   And it's flexible."

Great question, since I realize how difficult translation is. 

As I mentioned on the other thread, I thought the English translation of Katz und Maus, by Günter Grass, was not done well, at least in many parts, as I remember (but it`s been a long time, maybe 30 years since I looked at it). Some parts were fine, others too literal to even be intelligible. You`d have to compare the original German with the English translation to see. I could be wrong, but translating Günter Grass to English would not be an easy task for anyone, in my opinion. Some portions of some of his literature I`m sure is fairly easy to translate, but other parts quite challenging.

Another good translation of a more recent book (translated from the original English (US) to German) is „Selbstmord im Paradies, Innenansichten einer Sekte.“ This is a complete re-write of the original English title of „Seductive Poison“, by Deborah Layton. The English original title has nothing to do with the title appearing on the translated version, but the translated title probably more accurately captures the theme of the book, which is somewhat of an autobiography. It`s a fascinating tale about the 1978 suicide/murders of members of an American religious sect known as The People’s Temple, with its leader, Jim Jones, in a jungle encampment known as Jonestown, in Guyana, in November 1978. 

Other than the rather odd translation of the title, the actual translation of the book is probably good as it reads easily. I have to admit I`ve not read or compared the English version, but it would be interesting to do so. It was published in 2005 and translated by Parthas Verlag, Stresemannstraße 30, 10969, Berlin. I think the translator was Carrie Asman. 

I don’t read English language books and prefer German books, or German translations of books that originally are published in English, which is why I purchased this one a few years ago on Amazon.de. 

Yes, I think what you mentioned applies mostly to translation of literature. That's something that fascinates me too. To express very tiny nuances of connotations, emotions and so on in different languages.

But I think sometimes even the meaning is intendet to change in a translation. For example I could imagine, that in some very conservative, religious countries, vulgar content is censored or in North Corea political content is censored. And that could change the meaning I would speculate.

Also interesting is in my opinion the translation of names. Sometimes even names that don't mean anything at all in one language have to be changed for the use in another language. A funny example would be Vicks, the american company that produces for example cough drops and that was originally named Vick. In Germany they had to change their name to Wick because Vick sounds exactly like fick(to fuck), which for obvious reasons wouldn't be a good name for a company.