In Old English right now I'm translating Biblical passages. We have so much Anglo-Saxon written material partially due to a king back in the 800s called Alfred the Great, who for various reasons enacted a translation program of important works, one of which was naturally the Bible. Back then the Vulgate Bible was the preferred Latin translation of the church. The Vulgate has lots of problems in it, probably because it was a rush job by St. Jerome, and it's not quite an accurate representation of the Greek. However that's what Alfred had -- I'm willing to bet money no one in England could speak Greek at that time -- so the Old English is basically a translation of an already not perfect translation.

Now onto my textbook. The editors were kind enough to juxtapose modern English on the opposite page, but they decided to select the King James Version. Okay, I know that these fuckers are British (the publisher's in Oxford) and it's the Anglican Church, and you've had all these problems with the Catholic Church in the past, but Jesus Christ why did you choose the fucking KJV? It was translated directly from the Greek. You understand, right? It edited out all the problems from the Vulgate. So I'm reading the Old English, finding a sentence that doesn't quite make sense, turn my eyes to the KJV, and realizing that fucking sentence isn't worded the same way or just doesn't fucking exist. Thanks, the modern English you've given me is completely useless. Let me give you an example. In the Old English it says, "The angel said again to Abraham, 'I myself swear, says the Almighty, now that you did not wish to spare your only-begotten son, and my terror was to you more than his life..." The KJV says, "And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time and said, 'By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not witheld thy son, thine only son..." Okay, they have the same sense, but when I'm literally translating word by word here I need something more accurate than that. For one, the KJV has all these phrases before the angel even starts speaking. Then the Old English has something about the terror that the KJV doesn't have, which by the way was a really difficult sentence to translate and would've been great to have in modern English.

The editors must've realized they fucked up because below the KJV they threw in the original Latin Vulgate, which is to me an even bigger dick move. One, you're assuming I know Latin. I know for a fact in many British schools (your target audience) Old Engish is a requirement for English majors, who definitely didn't study Latin. Two, it proves you know you made a mistake and only did the minimal amount of effort to rectify it. You could've just fucking put an modern English translation of the Vulgate instead of sucking the KJV's cock! Or if you didn't feel like paying copyright, you could've translated it from the Latin yourself. Obviously you can read that shit if you slapped it in Latin on the page. Or if you were too lazy, there's always the free Douay-Rheims translation. I know it sounds really French, but I'd rather take that than the KJV.

It really pisses me off that people use the KJV to this extent. Like, go to Barnes & Noble. The entire Bible section is pretty much that. Why do people love it so much? It's written in an archaic English and for fucking King James, who had an monarchical agenda, and translation reflects that. I'm not saying it's a horrible but it's still not the greatest out there. And for situations like this it's fucking useless.