exactly so, iff a translation is word for word it reads the same to everybody. But if it is dynamic thought it becomes a commentary.
This is total nonsense. If you spoke any other language, you would know that you cannot translate word for word, ever! My Greek teacher, Bill Mounce, who has been on most of the modern Translation committees, and written many commentaries, used to scoff and people who say this.
Even translating modern languages m, you cant do word fir word. For example, in French (which I am fluent in!) la maison Blanche translates directly into English:
La maison blanche.
The house white.
That is bad English, because we say:
The white house. That is proper English. Further, the fact that maison is feminine in French is untranslatable to English. Same with genders in both Hebrew and Greek!
Hebrew has issues with verbs, plus it doesn't just have singular and plural, but dual verbs. There is no way dual verbs can ever be directly translated, without adding words. Plus their verb system is very different than in English. They start with a 3 letter root word, made of three consonants. The basic form is Qual, then Piel and a bunch of other forms we do not have. You can't directly translate a Hebrew verb to English.
Greek is much worse. They have noun and adjective cases.
Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Vocative (rare, found 9 times in the NT.)
Plus, Greek nouns have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. Plus singular and plural. So, most words have 4 cases x 3 genders x 2 numbers. So that is 24 different spelling differences, which vary at the end of the word, and sometimes the consonant, although some words are repeated! The genitive plural for "the" uses " tone" for each plural gender. I believe there are 17 different forms of "the" in Greek, as some are used twice, too.
The position of the word in English in the sentence determines whether it is the nominative -subject, or predicate, (unless it is a predicate nominative). The direct object in English is the accusative in Greek, the Dative the indirect object, and Genitive is used for possession. Greek would translate "the friend of his". We would likely say, "his friend." Or "the boy's father", with the apostrophe showing possession
In Greek, the most important thing in the sentence is thrown forward. So, the direct object could be the first part of the sentence, with article and descriptive adjectives agreeing in gender, case and number. The subject might end the sentence in Greek, and it is determined by the endings on the words, like other cases. If a Greek sentence is in some kind of reversed or different word order, in English, you would have a sentence that made no sense in English if you didn't reorder the sentence, plus move around the adjectives adverbs etc. It simply is not possible to keep the same order from Greek to English. German is much better, because it has cases and 3 genders, too. But it is a bit watered down and less forms than Greek.
Anyway, don't make stupid statements about things you have never studied and know nothing about. Anyone who says the KJV is "word for word" has never studied Greek! And I didn't get into the huge differences in verbs. Verbs are about time in English, the are about aspect in Greek. And so much more!