The translations I mostly relied on:
- La Bible Chouraqui
- La Bible de Jérusalem
- The King James Bible
- The New Revised Standard Version

Less often, I supplemented these readings with the Traduction Œcuménique de la Bible and by a few specialised articles concerning specific Psalms.

I don't think it's a good idea to translate without knowing Hebrew. Also, for sake of uniformity, I'd rely mostly on the style we already have in Helge's NQNT.

It's there a need for uniformity?

+Ицхак Пензев As far as I know, Helge hasn't translated the New Testament straight from Greek, neither the few excerpts he did from the Old Testament from Hebrew. And I know Tamas does the same. Like me, he relies on intermediate translations. This is why I compare several translations and rely heavily on the most litteral one.

That said, I would definitely be interested in getting feedback from somebody who can read the original, because I don't think I'll get to learn Hebrew before I'm retired, which is far from now.

Regarding style, I deliberately chose Parmaquesta because Helge preferred Ñoldorin Tarquesta for his NT translation. I may not read the original books, but I know the style difference between OT and NT is significant. Besides, the Psalms are one of the earliest books of OT and their language is quite archaic even compared to the more recent OT books. Also, I intend to calligraphy these Psalms afterwards, and it is easier to start from Parmaquesta to avoid transcription mistakes such as confusing silmë and thúlë.

By the way, once the translation is complete, it will be quite easy for anybody to get a Tarquesta version from my translation, because the change rules are well-known. The reverse (from Tarquesta to Parmaquesta) is much more difficult, as I experienced.

One side note: personally I find this kind of very word-by-word backtranslation more difficult to follow than straight English:)

You have all rights to do whatever you want. I see a need for uniformity, but this is purely my subjective opinion.

+Tamas Ferencz Duly noted. I'll avoid that for the next one I post.

+Damien Bador okay:) By the way, I have not even welcomed you to the community yet - very rude of me. So welcome! :) I hope you'll have a good time around here.

+Tamas Ferencz Thanks Tamas.

+Ицхак Пензев Your concern for uniformity is clearly a good one, and I understand your point of view.

Since it was a topic I thought about for some time prior to choosing Parmaquesta, I believed I should explain the reasoning behind my choice.

+Ицхак Пензев For that matter, though I believe that using different Quenya styles may reflect the various styles of the original texts, I definitely think that standardizing the neologisms would be useful.

As an example, I had to find a translation for “mule„ in Ps. 32, whereas this word isn't attested in Tolkien's writings, nor any cognate. We don't even get to have a word for “ass” (donkey), as far as I can tell. A friend of mine came up with perrocco for “mule„, which seems to me as good as we can get. However, I intend to check Helge's translations and see if he had already invented something for this animal (I don't think so, as the mule doesn't seem to appear in the New Testament).

Helge has pellopo for "donkey/ass"

I can see the trend here... It's funny, but unfortunate, as mule and ass can't be both “half-horse”, even with different derivations.

Thanks for checking, in any case. This stresses the usefulness of a discussion with Helge. Unfortunately, I haven't got an answer from him yet.

I think perrocco mule is the more horse-like, so I would use it. pellopo donkey can be like any horse-like animal IMHO.

BTW thank you +Paul Strack for the tip on italicizing.

+James Coish I agree with you on perrocco being better, since pellopo could be “half rabbit” now, given the newly attested lopo “rabbit” (PE21/31).

I think this is another case (especially for ass, donkey) where either a loanword or a new kenning is the solution. Something like *sindihelma, or something more metaphorical, if that feels too simplistic to you.

+Tamas Ferencz A loanword would probably be possible. Since the word "ass" is non-IE, it would be my natural choice. In such a case, I would preferentially take it from the Latin or Greek words.

Of course, a kenning could be possible too. The main issue I see with sindihelma is its unnatural length for such a usual animal. Besides, such a keening would have to be an old one, which means the h would appear as ks (metathesis of sk) in composition.

Hence, I would rather see something along the lines of sindiksel.

also...there are many lamnar sinde that could be confused.

+James Coish not necessarily. There must be hundreds of bird species that are black but only one of them is called blackbird. It's a name, once people get used to it that this specific kind of animal is called that, it sticks

true

+Damien Bador first I thought of *sindifara, but the early root behind EQ fara is probably obsolete

As of today, you'll find below the link toward the latest version of Ps. 1:
docs.google.com - Quenya Psalmist Wordlist

Please notice that the above version is no longer up-to-date.