Actors would take turns reading scenes in Grene's or Watling's or Jebb's translation while I followed along in the Greek and made notes of the points which were not coming across clearly in what I heard. The director and the actors and I would then engage in some discussion about what was happening in the scene and I would try to clarify points which they had not understood. I then took the results of that reading and discussion home and wrote my own translation of the scene. If the scene I gave the actors to read at our next meeting made it easier for them to understand what was going on and why the characters said what they did, I knew I was on the right track. The language used by American soldiers in Vietnam was the other influence on the translation.
Any translator faces the issue of style.
The language is recognizably poetic and exchanges between characters follow certain structural patterns which can strike modern actors and audiences as artificial. Characters in Greek tragedy do not speak the way Greeks spoke in everyday life. A certain degree of formality and elevation in the language of the translation is therefore appropriate. It is, however, possible to go too far in translating Sophocles into a 'poetic' style. The conventions of poetic form and stichomythic dialogue were so familiar to Athenian audiences that they would have seemed quite natural in the context of performance.