Rella ~ I am a woman
Well-Known Member
Ah, A new one for me.... I shall add it to the collectionI do discriminate between translations. Not all translations are equal.
I much prefer word-for-word translations (formal) to thought-for-thought translations (dynamic), and I put both of those ahead of paraphrases.
If you want to look at the original language in a concordance or lexicon, it's easy to do with a word-for-word translation (KJV, ESV). Once you know the meaning of the underlying word, you can carry that knowledge to every place where the same word occurs in English. You can't do that with with a dynamic translation (NIV), and this is important to me.
But formal translations tend to be clunky and lack flow. Some words don't have a good 1-to-1 equivalent between languages. The YLT shows what happens when you carry formal translation methods to their extreme - comprehensible not sometimes the English is. (I think Yoda may have been an editor).
Paraphrases have the easiest-to-understand English (Living Bible), but they aren't true translations. You're really reading someone else's understanding of some other version of the Bible. These are suitable for children.
There are a few Bibles that I regard as corrupt, usually because they have ADDED to the text. The Amplified Bible includes a massive amount of commentary that shows up as part of the text. The Scofield Bible has a huge bias in favor of... a particular end-times position... and uses chain-references and in-line commentary throughout to either make passages support that position, or explain away passages that don't support it. There are other chain-reference Bibles as well, and they tend to have the same problem, though not always the same theological bias.
edit: FWIW, the gold-standard Bible for those who are serious about studying the Bible is the NRESVUE, which is a modernization of the Revised Standard Version.
Thank you,