Julia E. Smith Parker Translation
The Julia Evelina Smith Parker Translation is considered the first complete translation of the Bible into English by a woman., she is still the only woman to have translated the entire Bible unaided. The Bible was titled The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues, and was published in 1876.
Translator
Julia E. Smith, of Glastonbury, Connecticut, had a working knowledge of Latin, Greek and [Biblical Biblical Hebrew Language|Hebrew Language|Hebrew]. Her father had been a Congregationalist minister before he became a lawyer. Having read the Bible in its original languages, she set about creating her own translation, which she completed in 1855, after a number of drafts. The work is a strictly literal rendering, always translating a Greek or Hebrew word with the same word wherever possible. Smith accomplished this work on her own in the span of eight years. She had sought out no help in the venture, even writing, "I do not see that anybody can know more about it than I do."Smith wanted to be as literal as possible, partially as a result of a failed end-of-the-world prediction by William Miller, which claimed to be based on biblical texts. Smith believed this failure stemmed from straying from the original languages of the Bible, and she set about to create a better translation.
Translation style
Smith's insistence on complete literalness, plus an effort to translate each original word with the same English word, combined with an uncompromising translation of Hebrew tenses resulted in a translation that some regard as mechanical. An example of this is Genesis 4:1:Noteworthy translation aspects in this verse are the name of Adam's wife, the future tense "will conceive" mixed with the past tense "knew", "said" and "obtained", the lack of quote marks, and translation of the Tetragrammaton. The Divine Name, Jehovah, is featured prominently throughout the Old Testament of this Bible version. In 5876 verses Jehovah appears 6934 times in the OT, per e-Sword. For example, Genesis 2:4 reads:
Another example of Smith's translation is Jeremiah 22:23:
Smith's strict literalism produces an English text that is very concise, at times using far fewer words than other translations. In addition to exact Hebrew tense translation, Greek tenses are also translated literally, providing the same raw transparency. Note the brevity and tense of John 3:16: