[bloak]

Kafka has a prose style that is relatively easy to read, because he tends to describe concrete things rather than abstractions and does not use many unusual words or idioms, but hard to translate because he exploits the relatively free word order of German to write elegantly structured long sentences that don't seem complex in German but can easily become complex in translation.

I read Der Process in German, but I have also looked at one of the English translations, probably the one by Idris Parry, and I didn't like it much: it seemed rough, old-fashioned and generally hard to read compared with the original, though it's partly a matter of personal taste. Wikipedia mentions six English translation of The Trial but presumably some of them are cheaper and more easily available than others so the probability that we both looked at the same English translation are greater than one in six!