"One of the most" Translation

Today I was reading a book and it had this phrase:

1950年代、史上もっとも偉大でもっとも創造的なSF作家の一人アイザック・アシモフが、…

This book was translated from English to Japanese and the original sentence included the phrase “one of the greatest and most creative science fiction writers”, which was translated to “もっとも偉大でもっとも創造的なSF作家の一人”. While this is a very faithful translation, it isn’t a very natural one.

One reason it sounds awkward, I think, has to do with the difference in word order. The Japanese translation first qualifies “もっとも偉大でもっとも創造的”, which makes the reader think, “wow, the greatest and most creative? Who could that be?” But when they look downwards (yes, this book has vertical text), they find “の一人”. “Okay, not exactly the best …” This causes a slight yet unnecessary letdown. This isn’t the case with the English version, however; the reader sees “one of” before “the greatest …”. They don’t need to dial back their expectation when reading this.

What’s also off-sounding about this specific JP sentence is that it sounds a little overly confident. Japanese writers tend to not definitively state someone is the most creative, knowledgeable, etc. because it’s a very subjective judgement. So we may try to retain some objectivity by saying something like “最も創造的といわれる” (meaning “is said to be the most creative”), if it’s actually a popular opinion, or otherwise avoid such judgments all together.

I see this “最も…の一人” translation often enough to start feeling frustrated when I see them so I thought to write about it. While I don’t consume much translated content, I find a lot of it (professionally produced) is riddled with awkward wording like this, which not only ruins the experience but also makes it hard to understand. But I also understand it takes a lot of extra time and effort to produce translation tha is both natural and faithful (I’ve experienced it myself in hobby projects). Considering how rarely I hear complaints about awkward translations from other Japanese people, there’s probably not much incentive to iron them out.