John Ormsby (translator)

John Ormsby (1829–1895) was a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish translator. He is most famous for his 1885 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha, perhaps the most scholarly and accurate English translation of the novel up to that time. It is so precise that Samuel Putnam, who published his own English translation of the novel in 1949, faults Ormsby for duplicating Cervantes' pronouns so closely that the meaning of the sentences sometimes becomes confusing.