listen. listen to me. if you read Emily Wilson's introduction to her translation. she explains all of her choices as a translator.
she talks about the act of translation itself, and its complexity. How there will always be cultural context that's missing even if your translation is accurate word-for-word, and one of the hardest parts of a translator's job is deciding how to approach that meta-textual layer of meaning.
(it's really very fascinating to read in and of itself! but I also already think about translation a lot)
She explains the reason for her more casual tone. It's not to "dumb down" the text in any way. It's not even really to make it "accessible" to modern readers – I mean, it was sort of her goal, but not the way people think when they hear an "accessible" text, exactly.
Emily Wilson makes the case for translating the Odyssey in straightforward English because the original Greek audience was everyday people listening to the language of their time.
She chose to make a translation that matched the original tone of the original language, instead of putting it into an older English vernacular so everyone would think of it as lofty and old and archaic. She wanted to create a version like the story we would hear if we were there in its era (approximately speaking, obviously).
And there's strengths to all the various versions! None of them are inherently more valuable than the others. It's helpful to have multiple people translate the same text, specifically so we can explore the various meanings of it. I think it's useful to have these different versions for teaching or reading in various contexts. You could, for example, have a 9th grade class compare two or more translations as part of an English lesson or something. But it's reductive to assume Emily Wilson made her translation in order to "dumb it down" for an illiterate populace.
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