HERE'S A QUESTION FOR YOU: what is the German for “careers officer”? A quick dip into Babel Fish, the translation website, comes back with the immediate response Karriere-offizier. Sounds fine to me - I always like it when foreign languages give the impression that they are just actually English with a bit of an 'Allo, 'Allo spin. But should any of you make the unlikely decision to read my first novel in German, you will find this innocuous phrase translated as Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-prozeß-Betruer. Put that into Babel Fish and it comes up as “Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person”. Which, even for German, is pushing the compound word thing a bit far, especially when just to hand is Karriereoffizier. There is an explanation for this. On a recent reading trip to Frankfurt, I asked my translator why “careers officer” had become such a long word in her languague; she replied, with that particular German smiling complacency: “Oh, I made up a word, to sound kind of sarcastic.”

Now, say what you like about the irrelevance of authorial intention but the truth remains that I never meant the phrase “careers officer” to be heard in the reader's head a bit sarkily. And even if I had, I like to think that my command of sarcasm might have extended to something a little more subtle than making up an absurd new title for the occupation. And besides: calling him “the reintegration into the working process responsible person” doesn't sound sarcastic. It just sounds mental.

Even before this happened, I didn't read novels in translation much. Language in novels is not simply about the conveyance of meaning. It's also about the resonance of the words, the rhythm and flow of sentence structure, wordplay. Whenever I pick up Madame Bovary, I always think, however great the translation, that I'm clearly missing out on all that - or at least, on the Flaubert level of all that. Take the first sentence of Alan Russell's classic 1950 translation: “We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in ‘civvies' and a school servant, carrying a big desk.”

Now I have no idea how good a translation that is: but the one thing I would immediately know is that it is a translation. The word “civvies”, its uncertainty highlighted by being put in inverted commas, tells you straight away that the English is trembling: and I have no idea exactly what a “school servant” is - an internet search reveals that alternative translations go for “handyman”, “janitor”, and “monitor”, all of which seem to me to have slightly different meanings.

But I did at least assume that what Flaubert meant to say in French would be rendered in English. Since the Frankfurt incident, I realise that non-native readers really are in the hands of the translator: a translator who may be tempted to think, after 430 pages of hard mot-justeian slog: “You know what - I think I can rather improve on Gustave here.”

Sadly, this makes me suspicious when reading non-English novels.At the moment I'm reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I've been meaning to read it for ages, mainly because of the title, which I've always thought a fabulous slap in the face for all those Amazon commentators who complain about disliking novels because the central characters are not exciting, or nice, or interesting enough. It's in a new translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, and not being able to speak more than the standard Jewish smattering of German, I've been enjoying it as much as one can enjoy Musil's 1,130-page digression. But then I reached the second volume, entitled Pseudo-

reality Prevails and I thought: hmmm, sounds a bit too much like a Grateful Dead album to me. So I checked it and the original is Seinesgleichen Geschieht, which was rendered in the previous English translation as The Like of It Now Happens. These two versions are so far apart as to make me distrust both.

To give a slightly less arcane example, in Jackie Kay's novel Trumpet, the lead character Joss Moody, a jazz musician, gives a passionate sweaty performance, after which, Kay writes, he goes into the bathroom “to hose off”. I have it on good authority that Kay was phoned by her German translator, immediately before putting his version of the novel to bed, to check that this did indeed mean “to masturbate”. Thank heavens for that call: otherwise Kay's novel might have ended up in the erotica sections of German bookstores - not a good place to be - and her translator would have been on the phone to his Reintegration into the Workplace Responsible Person.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Jane Bussman's Top 10 journalism tips
• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads