I’m quite new to looking into anything historical, but I’d like to read English translations of Ancient Greek texts, but I don’t know who to trust. So many translators seem to have been 19th - 20th century writers. I know it’s quite easy to Google who was the more accurate, but I don’t want read something that’s going to completely skip over paragraphs because the subject wasn’t acceptable at the time of the translations publication. Are there any translators I should stick to? Or perhaps a few I should avoid?
I do also want to say to the mods, I’m sorry if this has been recently asked, I had a look through the faq’s and couldn’t find this question, but I might have missed it. Also, thank you for running this subreddit, I came across it this morning and have spent all day flinging myself down rabbit holes because of it. It’s been great.
Recent is usually better. I'd avoid anything older than 1980, if you can. There are exceptions, like Lattimore's translation of the Iliad (1951), but they're not common.
For that reason I don't recommend translations you can find online, because they're the ones that are out of copyright -- they're usually over 100 years old, and in an unnecessarily archaic, or even obfuscatory, style.
For that reason I would almost always try and get hold of a recent publication, and NOT rely on translations on the Perseus website. Yes, to address your question directly, there are some translations on that site that are bowdlerised -- they skip some bits. The translations of Catullus and Petronius are wildly unreliable for that reason (they're originally in Latin, but the point stands); there is no translation of Daphnis and Chloe on Perseus, because that has sex scenes, so no one translated them until relatively recently.
There are times when you have to resort to older translations because no more recent translations don't exist. But for well known authors, there should be plenty.
Some published series are more reliable than others. The Oxford World's Classics series is generally good -- generally (e.g. one of their two translations of the Odyssey is excellent, the other is atrocious). The Penguin Classics and Loeb series are often OK, BUT only if you apply a strict cut-off of 'no translations of poetry older than 1980': the ones from earlier are terrible.
If you can find reviews, that's often a good way of getting a feel for the translation you're looking at.
Have you tried asking in r/ancientgreek?
A website that's nice to use is www.perseus.tufts.edu. The UI is not very straightforward, but you can look at many texts in Greek as well as a public domain English translation.
Generally, when reading poetic texts, you want a translation in prose, if you really care about the content. I don't really know about English translators, but in German, the Plato translations (for example) by Friedrich Schleiermacher are in a way that they follow the Greek so closely that the German is not easily understandable anymore, instead it clears up how the Greek text's grammar and syntax work. Schadewaldt' Homeric translations are almost as beautiful as the original, but in a much freer speech.