Using a thesaurus, as you suggest, can be stimulating, but you don’t want to send the reader off to the dictionary every eleven words or so. Genius has its place: an AngularJS textbook can’t read like Finnegans Wake. In most cases good translation is invisible, like good design.

One thing that makes writers valuable is that they have the freedom and the courage to get candid and bring who they are into anything they write. One might say that writers interpret their own souls, whereas translators interpret somebody else’s work. Function comes first, poetry second.