An important part of the translation process is the comparison of previous translations, into the same or different translations. Miles Coverdale, translator of the first printed English Bible (in 1526) writes: ``one translation declareth, openeth and illustrateth another, and ... in many cases one is a plain commentary unto another'' (quoted in the introduction to [Vaughan1967]). The KJV translators also stood firmly on the shoulders of the translation giants, including in their subtitle ...Translated out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised [KJV].
Having an aligned text of the type we describe facilitates research in the original languages of the Bible, as well as in comparative linguistics more generally. Particularly in langauges with no living speakers, the subtleties of the text are revealed primarily through examination of a variety of translated forms by expert scholars. The work of Olsen Olsen:1997a illustrates this methodology. In that research, Olsen explores, among other things, the potential translations of certain New Testament Greek grammatical forms as a way of discovering the range of meanings conveyed by such forms. The resulting data were used for a theoretical separation between the semantic (uncancelable) and pragmatic (cancelable and variable) meaning, a distinction important for computational lexicons.