Young's Literal Translation of the Bible

This  edition of the translation of the Bible into English made by Robert Young (1822-1888), which was first published in 1862 (a revised edition appeared in 1888). As the name implies, the Literal Translation is a strictly literal translation of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. In the introduction Young describes his translation philosophy as follows,


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There are two modes of translation which may be adopted in rendering into our own language the writings of an ancient author; the one is, to bring him before us in such a manner as that we may regard him as our own; the other, to transport ourselves, on the contrary, over to him, adopting his situation, modes of speaking, thinking, acting, — peculiarities of age and race, air, gesture, voice, etc. Each of these plans has its advantages, but the latter is incomparably the better of the two, being suited — not for the ever-varying modes of thinking and acting of the men of the fifth, or the tenth, or the fifteenth, or some other century, but — for all ages alike. All attempts to make Moses or Paul act, or speak, or reason, as if they were Englishmen of the nineteenth century, must inevitably tend to change the translator into a paraphrast or a commentator, characters which, however useful, stand altogether apart from that of him, who, with a work before him in one language, seeks only to transfer it into another.


In prosecuting the plan thus adopted, a literal translation was indispensable. No other kind of rendering could place the reader in the position contemplated, side by side with the writer — prepared to think as he does, to see as he sees, to reason, to feel, to weep, and to exult along with him. His very conception of time, even in the minor accidents of the grammatical past, present, future, are to become our own. If he speaks of an event, as now passing, we are not, on the logical ground of its having in reality already transpired, to translate his present as if it were a past; or if, on the other hand, his imagination pictures the future as if even at this moment present, we are not translators but expounders, and that of a tame description, if we take the liberty to convert his time, and tense — the grammatical expression of his time — into our own.