The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Lewis Page Mercier. Mercier cut nearly a quarter of Verne's French text and committed hundreds of translating errors, sometimes drastically distorting Verne's original (including uniformly mistranslating the French scaphandre — properly "diving suit" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete usage as "a type of lifejacket"). Some of these distortions may have been perpetrated for political reasons, such as Mercier's omitting the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of Nemo's stateroom, a collection originally including Daniel O'Connell[16] among other international figures. Nevertheless, Mercier's text became the standard English translation, and some later "re-translations" continued to recycle its mistakes, including mistranslating the title as "... under the Sea", rather than "... under the Seas".
In 1962, Anthony Bonner published a translation of the novel with Bantam Classics. This edition included an introduction by Ray Bradbury, comparing Captain Nemo to Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick.
A significant modern revision of Mercier's translation appeared in 1966, prepared by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press.[17] Miller addressed many of Mercier's errors in the volume's preface and restored a number of his deletions in the text. In 1976, Miller published "The Annotated Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea"[18] at the suggestion of the Thomas Y. Crowel Company editorial staff.[19] The cover declared it "The only completely restored and annotated edition". In 1993, Miller collaborated with his fellow Vernian Frederick Paul Walter to produce "The Completely Restored and Annotated Edition", published in 1993 by the Naval Institute Press.[20] Its text took advantage of Walter's unpublished translation, which Project Gutenberg later made available online.
In 1998, William Butcher issued a new, annotated translation with the title Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, published by Oxford University Press (ISBN 978-0-19-953927-7). Butcher includes detailed notes, a comprehensive bibliography, appendices and a wide-ranging introduction studying the novel from a literary perspective. In particular, his original research on the two manuscripts studies the radical changes to the plot and to the character of Nemo urged on Verne by Hetzel, his publisher.
In 2010, Frederick Paul Walter issued a fully revised, newly researched translation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater. Complete with an extensive introduction, textual notes, and bibliography, it appeared in an omnibus of five of Walter's Verne translations titled Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics and published by State University of New York Press (ISBN 978-1-4384-3238-0).
In 2017, David Coward issued a new translation published by Penguin Classics (ISBN 9780141394930) with the title Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, including a new introduction, notes, and a note on the text, using the 1871 Christian Chelebourg edition of the text as the basis for his translation. Coward also included 42 illustrations, which were published for the first time in the 'Collection Hetzel' in 1901.
