If one text is a translation of another, a back-translation is a translation of the translated text back into the language of the original text, made without reference to the original text. In the context of machine translation, this is also called a "round-trip translation."

Comparison of a back-translation to the original text is sometimes used as a quality check on the original translation, but it is certainly far from infallible and the reliability of this technique has been disputed.

Translation of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.) is considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Notable in Canadian literature specifically as translators are figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson and Linda Gaboriau, and the Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations.

Other writers, among many who have made a name for themselves as literary translators, include Vasily Zhukovsky, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Stiller and Haruki Murakami.