Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
It may not take much to convince you of the premise of this chapter. The Bible is, after all, the Bible. But literal translation has no claim to priority unless the individual words of the Bible are very important.
While I cannot address this subject at length, it needs to be addressed, to lay the foundation for you, the reader. My approach here is to assume that you have no knowledge of Bible translation issues, or the process of translating from the Original Languages (OL) of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, into what we call the Receptor Language (RL), such as English. However, this does not mean that we will pass over all the elements of this subject because some of them are essential to the issues of literal translation.
The Old Testament was originally written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, while the New Testament was written in what is known as Koine Greek, namely, common Greek. The Bible has been translated into at least hundreds of other languages, possibly as many as 2,600.