Bernofsky has an MFA in fiction writing from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She has translated contemporary and classical fiction by Ludwig Harig, Herman Hesse and Robert Walser and was the recipient of the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Outstanding Translation from German into English for her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The Old Child and Other Stories.

Her other honors and distinctions include a 2014 Guggenheim fellowship, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (for Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear), and the Lois Roth Award (for the translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone). Bernofsky has served as a chair of the PEN Translation Committee and co-edited the anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, and in 2010, she started the blog TRANSLATIONiSTA. Bernofsky currently directs the MFA Writing's Literary Translation Program at Columbia University.