A short story written in a narrative style can either include or not include dialogue and voice. For example, sometimes Ernest Hemingway's short stories have little to no dialogue, but a mood is set by the landscape and events that occur. Translators can look first at short story's speaker, whether the account is told in a first person, third person limited, or third person omniscient voice. Short stories in all of these forms train translators to look for subtle ways to move a story along but keep the original author's diction, tone and love of the language. Hemingway's "The Snow of Kilimanjaro" is an ideal descriptive narrative short story to translate from or into English.
A story loaded with dialogue enhances a translator's ability to spot, and accurately translate, colloquial speech. Dialects, sayings, slang words and jokes, for example, are often difficult to translate from one language to another --- a reader has to be on the "inside" to get why a particular line is comical or revelatory. However, the more translators work with the short story structure, the more likely it is the translator will find a way to channel the humor or poignancy of a line of dialogue from one language to another. Given that short stories are shorter and have a more concise language than novels, the dialogue in a short story is better for a translator to grasp and tackle.
Translating a humorous story is often challenging, given colloquial humor and sayings, but not so much as in children's books. Translating humorous children's stories influences a translating student to find the subtlety of the author's humor for a child's mind. For example, comic books and general children's books are, generally, written in simple tenses --- past, present or future. TinTin, the Belgian comic series, is subtly funny both because of the characters in the stories and because each character reacts to a dramatic event.
A coming-of-age story by John Updike, "A&P," is an ideal translation project to study voice. The narrator's voice carries the story from beginning to end. It starts, "In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them..." While tone is humorous throughout, because of his observations and ideas, the voice subtly becomes disturbed and demands a lot from the translator in choosing the correct words to accurately match Updike's precise "American" phrases and descriptions.