It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly unmanageable, or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no doubt, are so superabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness to which the humour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to Spanish, and can at best be only distantly imitated in any other tongue.

不是因为西班牙习语难以处理，也不是因为无法翻译的词汇众多，而是因为书中幽默所依赖的简洁有力的风格是西班牙语特有的，其他语言最多只能模仿其神韵。

Shelton had the inestimable advantage of belonging to the same generation as Cervantes; “Don Quixote” had to him a vitality that only a contemporary could feel; it cost him no dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes saw them; there is no anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish of Cervantes into the English of Shakespeare.

谢尔顿与塞万提斯属于同一时代，这给了他无可估量的优势；《堂吉诃德》对他来说充满了只有同时代人才能感受到的生命力；他无需费力就能像塞万提斯那样看待事物；他的语言中没有时代错误；他将塞万提斯的西班牙语翻译成了莎士比亚的英语。