Do you miss something when you read a book in translation?

Italian offers a neat pun for the worry: traduttore, traditore, translator, traitor. It is a good joke and a bad rule. Every translation loses something, but the interesting question is what, and whether it matters for the book in your hands.

What changes in translation

Sound and rhythm. Sentences in one language have a beat that can't be copied exactly into another. Translators rebuild it rather than transfer it, which is why two translations of the same paragraph can feel like different weather.

Wordplay and jokes. Puns almost never survive. A translator either finds an equivalent joke, explains it in a note, or lets it go.

Dialect and register. Many Italian novels move between standard Italian and dialect, or between formal and intimate forms of address. English has fewer tools for that, so a lot of social texture is flattened or has to be suggested another way.

Culture. Food, rituals, references to local history: the translator decides whether to keep the foreign word, explain it or swap it for something familiar. Keeping it preserves flavour; swapping it makes reading smoother.

Mixed languages. Some originals already contain more than one language. War and Peace has dialogue in French, and translators handle it differently, as we explain in our guide to finishing it.

What you don't lose

Plot, character, structure, ideas and most of the emotional weight travel well. That is why world literature exists as a shared thing at all. And a translation can sometimes gain: a translator who is also a fine writer can give a book a second life in a new language.

If you want to understand how this works in depth, David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (2011) is the classic popular book on the subject. Bellos, a translator and Princeton professor, ranges from conference interpreting and legal translation to literary translation, and reviewers praised it, as the Complete Review's roundup shows, for knocking down received ideas about what translation can and can't do.

How to compare translations

• Read the same opening page in two versions. Free ebook samples make this easy. Choose the voice you would happily hear for three hundred pages.
• Check the date. Older translations can feel stiff or Victorian to modern ears; newer ones can feel too casual. Neither is automatically better.
• Read the translator's note. Good translators explain their choices, and that tells you what to expect.
• For classics, look at reviews of translations, not just of the book.

Translators worth knowing

For Italian books, a few names are worth looking for on the cover:

• Ann Goldstein, who translated Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, starting with My Brilliant Friend, published in Italian in 2011 and in English in 2012, according to Wikipedia's page on the novel. See where to start with Ferrante.
• William Weaver, best known for his translations of Umberto Eco, Primo Levi and Italo Calvino over a career of more than fifty years, as Wikipedia's profile of Weaver notes.

For Russian classics, the name you will meet first is Constance Garnett, who translated dozens of volumes of Russian literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her versions brought Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to English readers and are still reprinted, though some later writers, including Nabokov, found them too smooth and old-fashioned, according to Wikipedia's article on Garnett. That debate is a perfect example of translation as taste.