Translation is tricky in any scenario, whether it be translating to or from a foreign language, or translating in the same language but two entirely different cultures or times. When transcribing a manuscript accurately, one must take into account both the obvious linguistic differences as well as the subtle connotational and cultural understanding of the text. Further complexities arise when the language is not in a romanticised alphabet nor the language of the text exists as it did when the document was written. And finally, there are the possibilities of a text going through multiple translators, "co-authors", and others who interacted with the text, and the uncertainty of the original, clouds the original intended meaning of the base text.
This is tornado of linguistic struggles the text The One Thousand and One Nights went through in order to arrive at the modern American editions and translations we hold in our library. The text is assumed to be a Persian prototype, sourcing back to the height of the Persian Empire in Arabia. As the region fluctuated away from Persian and into [a version] of Arabic, the story was translated and continued to spread through the Mediterranean world, at some point being translated into Egyptian and Syriac. It was then that Greeks were able to translate it, and from there it was quite accessible by the western world. However, orientalists of the west (namely from France and the United Kingdom), revisited the, what they believe to be, original text, translating directly from the Persian and/or Arabic. By doing this, the orientalists tried to achieve the most accurate translation of the original document by going directly to it, rather than indirectly through multiple generations, languages, and cultures.
You are right to note not simply the linguistic complexity involved in translation, but also the cultural and even political challenges involved in "accurately" translating an ancient text. The textual history of the "Nights", as the article you read demonstrates, is fraught with these tensions . However, it is fascinating to note that elements of the "Nights" pervade well-known "western" medieval texts such as Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and Bocaccio's "Decameron". The transmission of tales during the middle ages would be a fascinating topic of research.
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