"In his 1813 essay On the Different Methods of Translating, F.D.E. Schleiermacher argued that there were only two real strategies open to translators:
Either the translator (i) leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or (ii) he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.
The King James translators tended to favour the former approach, retaining the original word order and structure, even where an adjustment of the text toward the lexical patterns already familiar to the reader would have seemed entirely appropriate.
This specific approach to translation can be argued to give rise to two important features of the King James Bible. Perhaps the more obvious is easily noted by anyone who has looked at printed editions of this Bible - namely, that words added by the translators to bring out the meaning of the text, but which are not themselves present in the original, are typeset in such a way that they are distinguished from the remainder of the text.
The translators felt it right to make an absolute distinction between the biblical text itself and those slight additions they felt obligated to make to bring out its true meaning, even if the interposed words were generally uncontroversial."
[This is an extract from an article by Alistair McGrath. Read the whole piece at ABC's page dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.]
