Maybe you’ve found a translation that this site doesn’t cover and want to know if it’s any good. Maybe you just want to know what I’m looking for in a translation so you can decide whether you trust my recommendations.
Taste in poetry is obviously personal and subjective, and a lot of what I look for here is simply whether I like the style of translation, but there are a few more objective considerations:
On the one hand I want the translation to be poetry rather than prose (Campbell’s Loeb is fine as a reference text, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a translation to a layperson wanting to read Sappho!), but on the other hand I tend to be suspicious of excessive adherence to formal metrical constraints. In my experience this often results in translations sacrificing faithfulness to the original text.
I check some specific fragments, which I think give a useful sense of a translation. In line 1 of fr. 1, the most widely accepted reading is “Aphrodite of the sparkling throne”; an attested variant is “sparkling mind”. Which has the translator chosen, and if they have diverged from the standard reading have they justified it? Similarly I look at fr. 102 (paidos is usually translated as “boy”, but Rayor opts for “girl”, foregrounding Sappho’s queerness, while Balmer splits the difference with the gender-neutral “youth”). For recent translations, I also like to look at the Brothers Poem, particularly the verb in line 1 (I mark both Lombardo and Powell down for “chattering”).