Literal Standard Version

The Literal Standard Version (LSV) was published in full in February 2020 by Covenant Press, connected to the Covenant Christian Coalition. It is a major revision of Young's Literal Translation, the literal version the Scottish scholar Robert Young released in 1862. In the team's own words, the goal is a modern, easy-to-read, literal and accurate translation that is free to read, distribute and translate from.

The method is as formal as it gets. The LSV tries to keep the tenses of the original, render the same word the same way, and change word order only when English demands it. So Genesis reads oddly at first ("God says", in the present), and words the translators supply appear in brackets, as in John 1:14, "glory as of [the] only begotten of [the] Father". The divine name is written YHWH. The base is the Masoretic Text with Septuagint influence, and for the New Testament the Textus Receptus and the Majority Text.

If you want to see the shape of the original without knowing Hebrew or Greek, it is an excellent tool, close to a readable interlinear. The honest limit comes from the same place: the English is rough and sometimes choppy, it does not work for reading aloud or for beginners, and mechanical faithfulness to words can hide the sense of an idiom. It is a study-desk Bible, best read next to a more fluent translation. It is also a recent project from a small publisher, without the revision history of the major versions.

It is free because Covenant Press released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, which even allows commercial use. You can read, quote, share and even translate it, with credit and the same license.