Hans Christian Andersen is known in Britain primarily as a writer of stories for children. Although Andersen is frequently cited a a particular master of the fairy tale genre, this accolade is given chiefly because of his ability to create a 'good story', in terms of invention of action and characters. Many English readers are, however, unware of Andersen's extraordinary subtle use of language. The authors suggest that this is mainly due to the fact that the English audience read translated versions of his stories, which do not preserve the uniformity of a number of key termes employed in the original text. The authors show that certain key terms are lost after translation, even in a collection of translations rendered by the same translator.