Abstract This article presents the results of a study focusing on the reception of a fictional story by Kurt Vonnegut translated from English into Catalan and Dutch in three conditions: machine translated, post-edited, and human translated. Participants ( n = 223) rated the three conditions using three scales: narrative engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception. The results show that human translation had higher engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception in Catalan, compared to the post-edited and machine-translated translations. However, Dutch readers scored the post-edited translation higher than the human and machine translation, and the highest engagement and enjoyment scores were reported for the original English version. We hypothesize that when reading a fictional story in translation, not only are the condition and the quality of the translation key to understanding its reception, but also the participants’ reading patterns, reading language, and, potentially, the status of the source language in their own societies.