How we do this
A translation guide is only as good as its honesty. Here is exactly how the site is put together, so you can weigh it for yourself.
The same passage, really the same
For each work we fix three anchor passages: the opening, a set piece, and a famous crux. We locate them by structure (book, chapter, section, or line numbers), never by page, so the same moment lines up across every edition. When you compare, you are reading the identical passage in each translator’s hands, not three loosely similar bits.
Which edition is which translation
This is the part everyone gets wrong, retailers included. We start from the publisher’s own pages and library records, then verify the important in-print editions against the actual copyright page of a copy we hold. Every edition shows its mapping confidence: verified, publisher-stated, or inferred. If we have not checked it against the page yet, we say so.
How we rate a translation
We place each version on four plain axes: faithful to fluid, period to modern, clean to annotated, and spare to ornate. Those same scores drive the comparison table and the pick-for-me quiz. The written verdicts are ours, informed by the standard scholarship and by reading the passages closely. They are opinions, clearly labelled as such, not gospel.
The excerpts
Public-domain translations we quote at length, verbatim from a cited source we have checked. Everything in copyright appears only as a short excerpt for comparison, next to a link to buy that edition. We name the translator and edition for every excerpt. See Rights and quotation for the full policy.
Corrections
We will get some mappings wrong; the data is genuinely messy. If you spot an edition attributed to the wrong translator, or an excerpt that is off, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. Being right is the entire point of a guide like this.