Familiarity and favour: towards assessing psalm translations

Abstract

It is the objective of this paper to analyse selected English Renaissance translations of the Book of Psalms in the light of their reception. In particular, I intend to illustrate how a strong preference for a familiar rendition over a new one (regardless of its quality and status) showed itself in the textual composition of the most important book of the Anglican Church – the Book of Common Prayer. Discussion of the Psalm translation selected for the five successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer against the backdrop of the emergence of new renditions of the Psalms leads on to formulating a desideratum for sound methodology which would express the level of similarities between texts in mathematical terms and in this way objectivise assessments of Psalter renditions. The paper offers a preliminary attempt at such methodology by applying the cosine distance method. The obtained results need to be verified on a larger corpus of data, but they are promising enough to consider this method an important step towards assessing Psalm translations.