Syntactic and semantic differences, observed by comparing the source text and a translation of Daisy Miller by Henry James, sharpened the eye for the peculiarities of both versions: the original can be read as James' expression of his dislike and moral evaluation of literary expressionism through the design of Winterbournes character as an aesthete of surface observations. The translation, on the other hand, shows no features of characterisation that could be interpretated as such an intent. Instead, the translator inscribed the opinion of the most widely known German history of English and American literature into his text by portraying Winterbourne as a typical representative of what the historian sketched as Henry James' "psychological realism": a character registering the impressions of moral values.