My old friend B. J. Epstein (we co-edited our school’s literary journal back in high school) is a translator from Swedish and Norwegian (interestingly, not only did we both end up as translators, we both translate from languages not taught in our high school when we were there), and a blogger for HuffingtonPost UK. Her most recent piece is on how to read translations. Here’s an excerpt:

If we consider how we read – just compare how you read the newspaper to how you would read a textbook, or how you read a novel when you were a teenager to how you do so 15 years later – it becomes clear that we do read different texts in different ways, with different aims guiding our reading, at different points in our lives and in different contexts. This suggests, then, that reading a translation will be a different project from reading a non-translated piece of writing, and also that there are multiple ways of reading a translation, just as there are multiple ways of reading any text.