This article builds on a paper for a conference that set out to assess the importance of Robert Musil (a central figure in the evolution of twentieth-century culture and author of the encyclopedic novel, The Man without Qualities) with respect to the areas of science and technology in which, as qualified engineer and experimental psychologist, he had wide experience. The article focuses in particular on the challenges that I met when rendering into English some of the entries in Musil's diaries that were concerned with science and related matters. This task threw up several categories of problems for the translator including lexis (particularly on the way that a given word sends ripples of reference across different semantic fields), etymology (to which Musil was highly sensitive) and syntax (which he approached with an engineer's sense of the stresses in a sentence exerted by factors such as emphasis). In the present article I analyse a number of sample texts from different parts of Musil's ouevre that bear on such problems; the samples include extracts from the diaries dealing with the impact of science and technology on education, from one of his essays, and from a prose sketch. On the basis of these analyses, I explore representative difficulties that are faced by the translator and offer some suggestions about how the task of translation might be approached.