English speakers are resistant to works in translation. Yes, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was a bestseller. And there was Sophie's World; and the novels of Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson. And Tintin and Asterix. Oh, and The Bible. Really, it appears that we are not resistant to individual translated works but are likely to raise objections to the genre in general: a translation is no substitute for the original, poetry is what gets lost in translation, and so on. David Bellos  himself a distinguished translator, of Georges Perec and others  has little patience with such arguments.

A substitute for the original is precisely what a translation is, Bellos insists. If it is good it stands as a worthwhile work in its own right. The notion of the essence of the text is slippery, in any event. Does it exist only in the precise arrangement and sound of words? No doubt English translations lose some of the tang of Kafka's prose but they do not leave readers with a different notion of "Kafkaesque" than what German speakers understand by the term. Translating Perec's work, Bellos has produced versions that honour the spirit of their source, even while they diverge from equivalence. He gives a neat example of how translator Anthea Bell uses particularly English idioms to translate a joke in an Asterix speech bubble; and some of us may fondly call to mind Captain Haddock's "Blistering barnacles!", transferring to a different letter the alliteration of the milliards de mille sabords in Hergé's text.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? does not deal only with literary translation, and is in places somewhat drier than implied by the jokey title, which refers to the Babel fish from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But it also contains many diverting facts and speculations. How would you translate the scene where the German soldier says "Good luck" in The Great Escape? How do subtitlers work? Russian has no generic word for "blue". You'll learn a lot, and you may even abandon a prejudice.