Why did the ALT start with Youngs Literal Translation?
A practical reason for having begun with YLT is it is in the public domain. As such, derivative works of it can be done without copyright infringement problems. Otherwise, YLT was chosen since it is a very literal translation. So updating the archaic language in it for stage one provided a “jump start” in producing a literal translation in modern English. Later stages made significant changes to the text, but the literalness of this version provided a good starting point. There was also a major advantage in later stages by starting with an updated, completed translation rather than doing a completely new translation. As I was working on the ALT, I was constantly doing detailed word studies to determine the best translation(s) of the Hebrew or Greek words. By starting with a completed translation, once a study was done, I could then search for every occurrence of the word throughout the entire New Testament and make changes to the text as needed. So I only had to do each word study once
