What should a translation accomplish? The answer depends on the sort of work one is translating. Style does not matter in a scientific research report. Translations of philosophical treatises must, above all, present the argument correctly, which means the translator must actually understand it in order to choose the right terms. In a work of epistemology, it is a mistake to translate the Russian word oshchushchenie as “feeling” rather than “sensation,” even though both appear in a Russian-English dictionary. Dictionaries are never enough, and one can always tell that a translator doesn’t understand his job when he justifies his choices by referring to one. By relying on a dictionary, you could make a case for translating Pascal’s famous description of man not as a “thinking reed” but as a “cogitating clarinet.”
The key issue, in short, is purpose. Why is one undertaking the translation in the first place? Who is its intended audience? What is the most important thing to preserve if the purpose of translating is to be accomplished? Google Translate doesn’t worry about such questions. People should.
So let us ask: What is the purpose of translating Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Gogol’s Dead Souls, or Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground? Unless one specifies otherwise, it is to convey what makes these works masterpieces. The reader of the translation should be able to experience, as closely as possible, what a sensitive reader of the original might experience. That is the only way to appreciate what makes the work great.
One must therefore translate the work, not the words on the page. They are not the same. In recent decades, it has become a mark of sophistication to equate the work with “the text,” but translators who do so make a fundamental error. The text is no more the work than a score is music. The work is the experience the text is designed to produce. It is entirely possible to read a text and miss the work, and scholars often do so. To regard such concerns as philistine is to consider Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy philistine, since they, above all, kept in mind the experience of readers (or audiences).