Bible versions

Denny Burk offers a really good, brief, description of the distinctions among Bible translations, and the difference between a translation and a paraphrase:

When a Bible is rendered from one language into another, we call it translation. Translation happens anytime a scholar or a group of scholars reads the Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals and then translates them into a receptor language (like English in our case). There are two basic philosophies of Bible translation: (1) Formal Equivalence, which is a word-for-word approach to translating, and (2) Dynamic Equivalence, which is a thought-for-thought approach. All translations of the Scriptures fall somewhere on the spectrum between Formal Equivalence and Dynamic Equivalence.But not all Bible versions are translations like the ones in the diagram above. Some versions are paraphrases, and they are off of the spectrum because they are not rendering the Bible from the original tongues into a receptor language. The Living Bible, for instance, is a paraphrase of another English version—the American Standard Version. Other paraphrases, like The Message, are so interpretive that the result sits very loose from the Greek and Hebrew that it renders. [more]

Denny Burk » Point of Clarification on Bible Versions