Know the Target Audience, and Translate the Intent
The driveway at the typical middle-class home where I grew up. It's more than twice as long as the driveways of the "impressive experience."
A recent project contained the following sentence:
Uw verblijf is aan een oprijlaan gesitueerd, wat uw aankomst tot een imponerende beleving maakt.
Literally: Your home is situated at the end of a driveway, which makes your arrival an impressive experience.
Now, my job was to translate this for an affluent American audience. There is no affluent – or even middling – American who will be impressed by a simple driveway. So I did what a good translator should do: I dropped the last half of the sentence, then combined the modified first half with the next sentence to preserve the flow:
At the end of your private driveway lies your home, whose architecture…
