The continuing importance of linguistics for translation

It is sometimes argued that improved modern translations are making linguistic study less necessary than it used to be. Quite the contrary is true. Increased modern philological knowledge, while it has enabled us to overcome certain difficulties which the older translations had, has also made the assessment of meaning more approximative in character, has multiplied the factors which may bear upon it, and may thus have made the production of definitive translations more remote.—James Barr, in Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, 299