You ask which is correct. There is no single “correct” translation—indeed there cannot be one. “Perfect” translation is impossible because every human language is immersed in and deeply influences the culture of its speakers. Translators can seldom get firm footing when navigating the resulting differences.
As just one example of such cross-cultural quagmires—even between two cultures that share a language (pace Churchill)—consider Douglas Hofstadter’s discussion in his “Metamagical Themas” column in the September 1981 edition of Scientific American, in which he explores the question Who is the First Lady of Britain? Would it have been Margaret Thatcher? But she’s the one in power. Her husband, Dennis? But he’s a man. And so on.
The challenges of translating are magnificently summarized in the Italian expression Tradutore, traditore. Its denotation is that a translator is a traitor. But that English-language rendition is nearly lifeless. The French can do much better with their Traduire, c’est trahir; at least theirs rhymes. But to accomplish the rhyme they must switch from the agent to the action (from nouns to verbs), which softens the accusatory tone. And besides, the Italian original manages to consist of two words that differ by only a single (unstressed) vowel. You can see that trying to translate it ruins it. It’s nearly an act of treason against that beautiful utterance. And that’s precisely the utterance’s point. We have a masterpiece of self-reference. Or we might think of it as a self-proving proposition.
As to your example having to do with handling the genders of nouns in translating, check out the work of psychologist Lera Boroditsky, who found for instance that native speakers of German associated with the concept of bridges ideas like grace and beauty, while for Spanish speakers ideas like strength and size came more easily to mind. She links this difference to the respective genders of the word for bridge in the two languages: German’s feminine die Brücke and Spanish’s masculine el puente.
