On the other hand, sometimes newer translations do not justify the hype. I've put a lot of time into discriminating between available translations of stuff that I've read. People say, for example, you can't read The Count of Monte Cristo unless it's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about what the purportedly bowdlerized version of Dumas gets wrong, I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when someone actually articulates something concrete and falsifiable, it's something that doesn't hold up—"That was in the 19th century translation that I read..." And notwithstanding whether Pevear and Volokonsky's The Idiot was done by folks with more reverence for the original, theirs is basically unreadable from where I'm sitting.

It's also worth pondering whether the newer translations are riding on the coattails of their denigrated forebears—"would this have become as well-received a staple among English-speaking readers if the newer, purportedly better translation had been the only game in town from the beginning?"