What this article does is show yet again that translating involves just not translating individual words but making sure that the thought is clearly expressed. It gives lots of examples where the ESV's literal philosophy leads to unnatural and at times even misleading English. The ESV introduction says that the goal is to give the best insight into the original. The review assumes that the goal is to produce the most accurate translation. These two goals may not be entirely compatible.
Christians who grow up with the AV develop an understanding of "Biblish." This involves appreciation for Hebrew idioms as they show through the AV, and to other odd syntax and word choice. Should we translate into that kind of Biblish? There's a sense in which it does indeed show more about the original wording. I think the ESV translation assumes that it is desirable for Christians to develop this kind of skill. The review, on the contrary, assumes that it is the job of a translation to produce English that is natural. That is, they say you should be able to look at a sentence and ask "would anyone actually say this?" But it seems to me that the ESV philosophy does not actually accept that goal. There is an implication -- not so much in the official introduction to the ESV as in some of the publicity -- that if the original words are inspired, we should want to get as close as possible them, and perhaps make some tradeoffs in naturalness of the language.
Personally I think the proper goal is to produce a natural translation, and to use tools such as interlinears to get more information about the exact form of the original. I'm afraid that not many of our people today will get the full meaning from a translation into Biblish (if indeed they ever did). (1) Many Christians today didn't grow up hearing Biblish, (2) those that did may be used to hearing it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually know what it means -- even if they think they do.
The paper also points to inconsistencies in handling gender. Phrases that are gender-neutral in Greek may be translated either into neutral or masculine English references with no obvious consistency, sometimes varying even in the same verse.
I don't like some of the neutral renderings in NRSV, but at least I know that whether the English is gendered or not reflects the original. Similarly in a traditional translation I know that masculine language may well correspond to neutral originals. But a translation that is half gender-neutral means you can't really tell what's going on.
