“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” This is the iconic opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, as translated from the original German by Edwin and Willa Muir in 1933.

Here’s a different version of the same line: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” This translation was made by Stanley Corngold in 1972.

And here’s another one, by Christopher Moncrieff in 2014: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed into an enormous bedbug.”

The Metamorphosis is an old favorite of mine, and the version I had read years ago was similar to the Muir translation, using the word “insect” to describe the creature that Gregor Samsa had transformed into. Using my own imagination, I visualized it as a giant beetle. The specific German term Kafka uses, ungeheueren Ungeziefer, has no literal English translation, which gives translators the heavy responsibility of figuring out the best way to stay true to Kafka’s writing. For instance, the word “vermin” could convey an animal other than an insect; in other translations, specific terms like “bedbug” or “cockroach” leave little to the imagination. Evidently, different translators had different approaches — and that was just one word. If you’ve read a translation of The Metamorphosis that was different from what I have, could we really say we’ve read the same book?

This year, I endeavored to read more foreign books that weren’t originally written in English. And one thing I’ve discovered is that reading a translated book takes a certain amount of trust. When you read a book in its original language, you’re getting it straight from the author, like an intimate one-on-one conversation. Even then, the message doesn’t reach you in its purely original form; you interpret it through your own lens, which can distort the author’s thoughts. When you’re reading a translation, the book goes through the translator’s filter first — and you have to trust that they’re conveying the original message to you as much as possible. In a way, I haven’t really read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; instead, I’ve seen it through the eyes of Gregory Rabassa, as he translated it from Spanish to English. And those aren’t really the same book either.

Translation is not an exact science. The same input doesn’t necessarily produce the same output, and the output itself doesn’t reflect the input as it was originally intended. It’s not just because different translators have different points of view — it’s also because of the inherent nature of languages. As translator Edith Grossman once said, “there is no such thing as a literal translation.” There are words that are untranslatable, and each language has its own grammatical structure. For instance, the Korean language, unlike English, often omits the subject in a sentence. This is possibly why, when Deborah Smith translated Korean author Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, she was criticized for misattributing some actions and dialogue to the wrong characters. Forgoing carelessness, however, it is still impossible to convey the exact meaning, tone, and emotion of a particular Korean sentence when translating it to English simply due to the difference in the two language’s words and syntaxes.

But the imprecision of translation doesn’t make it worthless. Rather, it makes it a form of art, almost on par with writing an original book in its entirety. It takes more than just knowing two languages to translate a story; it requires a deep understanding of cultures and a natural intuition for the subtext beneath an author’s words. Once an entire book has been translated, the result can never be attributed completely to the original author — in the process, the translator has made the book their own. Thus, it’s strange how, in all the translated books I’ve read this year, not a single one credits the translator on the front cover. True, without the original author, the translator would not be able to produce such a literary piece by themselves. But, without the translator, the author’s work would not be able to reach and captivate many readers all over the world.

Without translation, I’d never have experienced Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s elegant prose, or Han Kang’s peculiar stories. We’d never learn about ancient epics like the Iliad or the Mahabharata. Billions around the world would never know the word of God. Yes, translations are never perfect, but a world where translation is perfect is one where every culture is the same. When we look through the cracks of imperfect translations, we see the diversity of the cultures and literatures of the world — and that’s where the beauty lies.