Recent years have witnessed a considerable increase in the interest in international reading literacy studies. Thanks to the widely cited PISA study, for instance, we have been told that Finnish students are the best readers in OECD countries. Such a result, however, would only be valid if all the texts and translations used in the reading test, written in all the different languages, were equivalent, or comparable, to each other and thus equally easy or difficult to read and understand. This study examines the special problems of equivalence that arise when translating texts in...