Jules Verne's masterpiece, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), has something of an interesting history. Literature critics on the continent praised Verne for the scientific fact that peppers the narrative, and lauded his rich, three-dimensional characters. Meanwhile, critics in England and America complained about the lack of science in a science fiction novel, and thought his two-dimensional characters were little more than caricatures. For over a century, this was the state of things.
Then, in the mid-1970s, Walter James Miller put out The Annotated Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. In it, he described how he discovered that the original translator of Verne into English, a man named Mercier Lewis, did such a poor job that he ruined the story. Fully 23% of Verne's novel was cut for the Lewis "translation," including most of the science and much of the characterization. Those scientific explanations that Lewis did translate were often wrong, as if Lewis was both scientifically illiterate and poorly educated in the French language. For example, in one much-criticized passage, Lewis has Captain Nemo say that steel has a density ".7 to .8 that of water." In fact, steel has a density 7.8 times that of water, as Verne originally wrote. The many factual errors and editing cuts made the story seem trite and poorly researched to English speakers, when in fact the opposite is the case.
Nevertheless, despite the scrutiny critics and science-fiction historians placed Verne's writing under, no-one detected the subterfuge until recently. As Miller points out, Mercier Lewis' "translation" is now in the public domain, and most publishing houses will prefer to use the free translation available to them, rather than paying to have a new translation made. And so Lewis' translations continue to plague the vintage science fiction market.
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