A Game Of Telephone: How Accurate Can Translation Really Be?

Imagine sitting in a circle with a few people where each of you knows only two languages -- one shared with the person on your left, and one shared with the person on your right. If you say something to the person on your right and ask them to pass on the message, it might very well be that, after being passed along all the languages, it comes out sounding very different from the original message. This might seem like a very weird game of Telephone to you, but in the same way that whispering impairs your ability to hear the message, so translation works as an imperfect communication channel. When you try to translate a message into a different language, you can change its intended meaning without being aware of it. Oftentimes messages are subjective, ambiguous, or, in some cases, even impossible to represent without any loss of information. But why is translation such a challenge? And in being so, can we ever achieve such a thing as a perfect translation?