the trouble with translation

I’m reading Yukio Mishima’s ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ right now and in the first 50 or so pages have run across the word pellucid twice. Not a word you happen upon often. And twice in so short a time is jarring. It tends to drop you out of the story and say to yourself, “pellucid, again?” I need to look up another translated version and see how those passages are handled. It doesn’t seem like a word that Mishima would use, at least not repeatedly.

This put me in mind of a post I saw recently on a favorite site, Moon River, about word frequency in texts called volumetric redundancies (and the link from there to the original post is pretty cool too).