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I thoroughly agree that it's best to keep the old words; part of the reason to read old books is to savor the flavor of the text. The old words also broaden one's appreciation of the evolution of language. Translating obsolete or out-of-favor words would only be appropriate if one is producing an edition for easy reading by children, or perhaps for introductory textbooks (but why would anyone want to produce such textbooks).
I often work with really old English science books dating back to the late 1600s and very early 1700s, and I know that trying to substitute modern equivalents for numerous commonly used words in these books would be enormously difficult, and probably would produce many errors because of faulty decisions about appropriate substitutes.
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