I might pencil in three or four alternatives to a verb, or suggest a change in word order or even a radically different approach to rendering the verse. I draw lines and arrows, ask questions, and make pronouncements. I ponder nuances of meaning, listen to the sound of words echoing off words, feel for their rhythm as they jostle for position. And after doing all that and seeing I still haven't gotten it right, I find myself hoping a colleague across the country is having better luck with the passage than I am. This question, and many others, cannot be answered without recourse to translation theory.
All translation is interpretation.
At every point, the translator is required to interpret, evaluate, judge, and choose. Because no translation can hope to do justice to every feature in the original, choices are made, and each entails a value judgment. This does not mean that translation is merely subjective, but we should guard against the illusion that there is a single right way of treating translation in general or any one passage in particular. The Holy Grail of contemporary Bible translation is the often elusive combination of accuracy and readability. Almost nothing, I would argue.