1960 Critical reaction For decades, Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann were the only versions that existed in the English-speaking world, aside from Herman George Scheffauer's. Mann expressed his appreciation to Lowe-Porter for her work, nicknaming her "die Lowe", but also added the caveat, "insofar as my linguistic knowledge suffices". Critic Theodore Ziolkowski said of Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's Buddenbrooks: Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics. Other commentaries on her translations have included the following: The Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann, despite occasional inaccuracies almost inevitable in works of such length and complexity, convey the ironic and pyrotechnical style of the original with great effectiveness. Despite minor inaccuracies, misreadings, and possible errors of judgment (to which all translators are subject, whatever they may say), Lowe-Porter's translations are widely beloved and have become classics in their own right, to stand beside Constance Garnett's Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Scott Moncrieff's Proust. She is indisputably, in quantity as in quality, one of the great translators of our time. Thomas Mann and Proust were lucky in their translators.Though early reviewers were generally impressed by the relative readability of Lowe-Porter's English and by the sheer scale of the task, from the 1950s on doubts were expressed about the accuracy of the translations, culminating in Timothy Buck's study which led him to conclude that they constituted "grossly distorted and diminished versions" of Mann's work, and that "the loss, not only of accuracy but also of quality, is inestimable." Not only was her grasp of German so shaky that she made countless elementary errors of comprehension, but she also made frequent omissions and additions and unnecessarily simplified Mann's characteristic complex syntax. A review of John E. Woods' translation of Mann's Buddenbrooks states that, in her translation of the novel, Lowe-Porter "leveled Mann's colorful variety of speech into a uniformly even style, in certain cases simply omitting passages. As a result, much of the novel's humor was lost." A new assessment of the English translations of Thomas Mann within the framework of modern descriptive-analytical translation studies has been provided by David Horton. Horton seeks to move beyond an exclusively error-based evaluation of literary translation, examines various salient dimensions of versions by Lowe-Porter, David Luke, and John E. Woods, and demonstrates that Lowe-Porter's approach to translation was in keeping with the practice prevalent at the time. A review of Horton's