A translated book has crossed a distance that its reader may barely notice.

Reading a translation feels like reading, plainly and directly, which is the whole achievement. Someone spent months deciding what a joke should become in another language, which rhythm to sacrifice, where a word has no equivalent and a choice had to be made instead. The smoother it reads, the more invisible that labour becomes.

Look at the front of the next translated book you pick up and learn the translator’s name. If a passage moves you, some of that belongs to them. Naming the person who carried a book across a language is a small correction that costs nothing.