'cultural neutrality' in translations

From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
> >Indubitably. I seem to remember that someone suggested doing it as a
> >translation exercise, and some people (including me) didn't want to
> >do it because it wasn't culturally neutral, but heavily biased in the
> >direction of 20th century Western culture.
[snip]
> But how does a lack of "cultural neutrality" make something bad as an
> translation exercise? Translating, for example, the UN declaration of human
> rights into some language surely doesn't mean you agree with its content.
> You could even be translating it so that the poor speakers of language X can
> see for themselves how vile it is ...
Well, for those of us that haven't got large conlang vocabularies yet, a
document like that would call for new word-concepts or whatnot [which would have
to end up in the lexicon], and the very doing of it may skew the conlanger's
mind in their general direction.

Now, if enough lexicon already existed, and someone else translated it, then
hmm...

        Or not.

[I wouldn't translate it to Hadwan, because it would be anachronistic... it
would be like making that Latin translation of it they have.  Hrf...]

     *Muke!