The American Bible Society estimates there are about 900 English translations and paraphrases, but only a few are widely accepted by the church. For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to address reasons for New Testament translations:
Families of texts
Definitions first. A “Manuscript” is an ancient handwritten copy of the Bible, and a “Text” is someone’s compilation of a set of manuscripts attempting to give a good representation of the originals. English translations are made from mostly two texts:
The Majority Text is translated from the majority of Greek manuscripts, and we have about 8,000.
The Westcott-Hort text-type (WH) is based on a few manuscripts, but these are older than those of the Majority Text. The question is, “Should we depend on the oldest but the few or the newer but the largest library of manuscripts?”
As a result, we have two “families of Bibles” produced. The King James Version (KJV) and New King James Version (NKJV) are translated from the Majority Text. Almost all other modern translations are translated from the Westcort-Hort text. All are well accepted. There is really no doctrinal difference.
Philosophy
There are different philosophies of translations, too. There are the “word-for-word” translations where each Greek word in the text is directly translated into English. Examples would be the KJV, New American Standard Bible (NASB) and the English Standard Version (ESV). The benefit is we are less likely go see the translator’s bias in the translation.
Then there are idiomatic translations. These translate meaning as well as actual language. In Spanish, “You are pulling my hair” is similar to the English, “You are pulling my leg.” Idiomatic translations such as the New Living Translation and New International Version would translate it “You are pulling my leg,” while the NASB would translate it exactly as stated.
Both of these types of translations are occasionally revised and improved when new understanding of the language or better understanding of a particular portion of text occur.
And, there are paraphrases like the old Living Bible and the Philips Paraphrase. These are not translations at all but just a paraphrase of what the author thought the biblical text was saying.
Lastly, there are biased “translations” like the Watchtower’s New World Translation (NWT) which is not a translation but is presented as such to the readers. The Watchtower has changed portions of the Bible to support their own doctrines and convince the reader the Watchtower is correct in their teaching.
As usual, an estended version of this post is available at the menu item of the same name.
Believers Armed and Dangerous 