Pathé, Baby.

It seems like, in translating a novel, the problems one comes across can be divided into the aesthetic and the cultural. 

The aesthetic ones are, if not necessarily more easily tackled, then at least less dire to the actual flow and comprehension and relevance of the novel. These are the ones that have to do with poetry: picking between "naked" and "nude" and "unclothed," or between "pious" and "religious." These questions must be tackled in every phrase, on every page, and they are what contribute to the general flow and readability of the novel. No one is going to misunderstand you; at the very most they will call you a lousy writer. 

So the issue at hand, mostly, is what to do when an English-speaking public has mostly no idea about what you're talking about. This came up for me the other day in a reference to the Pathé Baby, an amateur home movie camera, sort of a precursor to the Super 8.

 Pathé Baby, 1923

In the novel, the reference was thrown out there as though everyone and their dog would know what Pathé Baby minirolls would be. And hell, maybe it's true, maybe I'm the only one who's never heard of that. But I don't think so. I'm not even sure that it wouldn't be a fairly obscure reference even to a francophone audience. 

So. I have to make the decision. Either adapt the text, substituting an alternate, more well-known but similar object for the Pathé Baby 9.5mm film rolls, (perhaps a Kodak 8mm, or a Super 8?) to make the text accessible to an English-speaking reader, or to leave it as it is, inspiring some readers to look it up and find out what the heck the novel is talking about, but perhaps alienating others with such an obscure reference. 

This is the endless debate over whether a translation should be "dumbed down" for its target audience (a less-than-appealing term for a widely embraced practice), or maintained as close as possible to the original text, and damn you if you don't get it.