In 1959 the poet Christopher Logue was invited by Donald Carne-Ross to translate part of Homer's Iliad for production on the BBC Third Programme. Logue knows no ancient Greek but Carne-Ross thought this unimportant and suggested that he look at other people's translations from Chapman onwards. ‘True translation is much more a commentary of the original than a substitute for it’, wrote Carne-Ross later.

In an interview with Rupert Christiansen published in The Observer in 1991, the English translator and director Jeremy Sams suggested that ‘You can't perform something in English and the original at the same time; and frankly worrying that it doesn't sound sufficiently like the original is the least of my worries.’ Christiansen in the same article revealed his concern at prevailing attitudes when he suggested that nowadays ‘Respect for a playwright's precise meaning comes second to the hitting at a snappy approximation to it’.

Brian Logan wrote an article for The Guardian in 2003 in which he considered the approaches of a number of translators to whom he had spoken, Christopher Hampton, Ranjit Bolt, Martin Crimp and Pam Gems among them. Bolt's approach was to take liberties. ‘If I think, “There's a good laugh here and Molière hasn't got it”, then I'll put in an extra couplet.’