Reddit mentions of Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghad to the Volga River

I'll be quite frank in saying that I haven't read Ibn Fadlan in either the original or in translation, but after looking into the question, as is so often true of Arabic texts, you don't have a lot of choices.

Unless you speak something other than English, there are basically three translations in print:

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-Travellers/dp/0140455078/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503110083&sr=1-1&keywords=ibn+fadlan

and:

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlans-Journey-Russia-Tenth-Century/dp/155876366X

and:

https://nyupress.org/books/9781479899890/

In his introduction to the last one, which is also the most recent chronologically published, Montgomery notes in regard to the other two translations:

> My translation aspires to
lucidity and legibility. James E. McKeithen’s excellent PhD thesis
(Indiana University, 1979) will satisfy the reader in search of a crib
of the Arabic. There are two other translations into English, by
Richard N. Frye (2005) and by the late Paul Lunde and Caroline
Stone (2012). They are both admirable: Frye’s is very useful for the
studies he provides alongside the translation, and Lunde and Stone
have produced a nicely readable version of the work. Both, however,
effectively promote a version of Ibn Faḍlān’s text dominated
by Yāqūt’s quotations.

Which is to say the commentary of the compiler from which Ibn Fadlan's text is recorded (i.e. we don't actually have Ibn Fadlan's tex to translate from.)

Montgomery's introduction is worth reading in full as I think it will explain some of the problems in preparing a translation from such a source:

https://nyupress.org/webchapters/Montgomery_Mission_Introduction.pdf

In particular, Montgomery is trying to shave off the outside commentary, as a result his work is considerably shorter.

Frankly, to a lay reader, I'm not sure it would make much of a difference.

If you have any other languages, particularly German, there may be other translations that are worthwhile.

I like what he does in Eaters of the Dead, taking the narrative of the original Beowulf poem and then turning it into an epistolary novel based on Ahmad Ibn Fadlan's real manuscript, which is a fascinating read in its own right