In my personal opinion, Proust is incomparably better in the original French than it is in any English translation. I highly recommend that anyone with some knowledge of and interest in French try to read Recherche in the original. It's possible to enjoy the work with about a B2 level (two years of university French, plus perhaps some extra reading practice). In particular if you feel reasonably comfortable reading high-quality modern French literature you should give Proust a try. Especially with electronic versions (either free or paid) you can look up words very quickly. It might be a little slow at first, but Proust's gorgeous language is worth savoring.
If you must read in English, my personal recommendation is that the Scott Moncrieff adaptations (and their updates) as well as the Grieve adaptations (I use "adaptation" as both deviate greatly from the source text) are to be avoided if you care about at least having an idea of what Proust originally wrote. However many people seem to enjoy Scott Moncrieff's turgid, purple prose, and amazingly some even seem to like Grieve, whom I consider completely incompetent.
This leaves the Penguin and Oxford series (save the second volume of Penguin). I personally prefer Penguin over Oxford for volume 1, although both could be considerably improved. Oxford is unchallenged for volume 2. I haven't looked enough at the contenders for volume 3. For volume 4 I find Oxford far better. That is the last Oxford volume currently available, so one would have to wait or read Penguin for the remaining volumes.
Note however that everyone's taste differs, and it's worth reading samples to determine what you personally prefer, especially for such a substantial novel.
I have translated a few short passages myself which can be found here. The goal was to try to capture as best I could in English the beauty I felt reading the original, for friends who don't read French. This of course wasn't quite possible, but I felt I needed at least to fix errors and weaknesses of the various published translations.
Here are some web resources to help compare translations, but they all predate the Oxford series save for the first volume.
Reading Proust, Daniel Ford
A valuable in-depth comparison between several of the translations, but with little emphasis on the original text. Contains a particularly worthwhile letter by Lydia Davis defending her translation.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922): Works in Translation, University at Buffalo Libraries
Break your bleedin’ heart, Michael Wood (London Review of Books, January 4, 2024)
There is also a 2020 book by Herbert E. Craig, predating only the Oxford Proust, which not only compares the English translations done to that point but the Spanish ones as well: Assessing the English and Spanish Translations of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Unfortunately the book is very expensive and I cannot find a library copy, so I have not read it. There is however a review of the book online which summarizes some of Craig's conclusions.
Different translators have different aims, and it is worthwhile to read their notes to see if their aesthetics align with your own. Often the notes for a particular volume can be read as part of the preview on Amazon, for example. Here are a few separate articles.
Lydia Davis: Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle: Closely Translating Proust
James Grieve: Working With the Demented
Richard Howard: I Have Gone to Bed Early: Translating Proust
There are basically two major categories of English translations: those based on the original Scott Moncrieff translations of the first six volumes (and Hudson, Blossom or Mayor for Le Temps retrouvé) and everything else. Likely due to copyright issues the Scott Moncrieff translations and their variants had a monopoly until they fell into the public domain in the 2000s.
The original Scott Moncrieff translations (1921 to 1929) are themselves now in the public domain and can be found for free online. There is no reason to pay for any version of these translations. Beware, however, that they are filled with serious errors, many of which were corrected by the updates below.
Published as a silver three-volume boxed set by Vintage in 1981. The primary impetus for this version was to follow the 1954 Pléiade edition. Essentially superseded by the Enright edition.
This version for Modern Library in 1992 and based on Kilmartin's version, was created to follow the 1989 Pléiade edition. The first version to restore the proper title of the overall work.
Carter's series for Yale University Press, based also on the 1989 Pléiade edition, follows Scott Moncrieff's translation but undoes many of the Kilmartin/Enright changes in favor of his own. The volumes were published between 2013 and 2025.
The first non-Scott Moncrieff translation of the entire series, published in the UK by Penguin in 2003 but due to copyright law differences not available in the US until later. The series editor was Christopher Prendergast and a different person translated each volume. Here's a link to the first volume.
A new series edited by Adam Watt starting in 2023 with the first four volumes published as of July 2026. Here's a link to the first volume.
See the Michael Wood article above for a review of this plus the Oxford Swann above. See also Richard Howard's comments.
(2023) Swann's Way (New York Review Books), translated by James Grieve, who also translated In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower for the Penguin Proust. This book was originally published in 1982 by the Australian National University.
AI translations of the whole series were self-published in 2024 under the name "David Petault", who as of March 6, 2026 had 154 titles listed on Amazon of translations of classics from a number of languages. These should clearly be avoided. If you want an AI translation just feed the public domain French text into your favorite LLM.
Note that AI is increasingly being used as a tool by human translators, typically without acknowedgement, including in the Oxford Proust as documented here.