How much time is needed to translate the Old Testament

Goldingay reports that translating the First Testament consumed an hour of his time daily for five years. (7 days a week?) That would be 7*50*5 = 1750 hours.

My estimate of what pace I could keep by the end of the project was 10 verses per hour. That would be 2,320 hours. From June 2015, I scheduled 4 hours a day 5 days a week 45 weeks of the year = 900 hours a year or about 3150 hours to November 2018.  Of course I could not do 10 verses an hour in the beginning. I took that whole first summer in 2006 on Psalms 1 and 2. (So I am just barely approaching my teen-age years in Hebrew.)

I was also developing strategies, gradually deriving a concordance by stem, writing a prediction algorithm, and methods of presenting the data over these past 10-12 years. 9000 hours is probably not a bad estimate for the whole project including the psalms (2006 - 2013), but it is hard to distinguish the time for learning, programming, translating, and now, correcting, and refining.

On gender:

[Goldingay] lets his translation stay gendered wherever “inclusivizing it obscures whether the text is using singular or plural.” So “he,” when it refers to an individual, is not replaced by Goldingay’s personal preference, “he or she” or “they.” Psalm 1:3, for example, says: He is like a tree planted by channels of water.

I have a real ambivalence here. The singular and plural are less important than what I first thought. Our singularities are only formed in community, and our communities are often addressed as a singularity. E.g. the single נפשׁ for the group that Abraham dealt with in Exodus 12:5. (KJV just pluralizes it as souls without a word. So do NIV and JB, people). So it is not as important to use thee and thou or he and she vs they as one might think. I sometimes use it as a personal pronoun. It is usually obvious when I shift into this style and it usually fits the character of the passage.

On names (Goldingay):

we get the Hebrew transliteration Yerushalaim for the expected Jerusalem, Hizqiyyahu for Hezekiah, Misrayim for Egypt, and Yehudah for Judah.

I pondered doing this and eventually left many names as they are traditionally for common names. But not always. The lists of names are not usually read, so I threw some gems in to lighten the load. There is also revealing music for some of these lists.

On the ark of Noah,

instead of Noah’s “ark,” Goldingay gives us “a chest of gopher wood,”

I give you Noah's תבה barge. I reserve ark for the ark (ארה) of the covenant. Different Hebrew stem, different English gloss - with very few exceptions.

On headings in the text, I have none apart from book names. All my verses are equal. Except in the Psalms, there are no extra spaces between stanzas. The form of the whole is in the music. I want people to hear the text, not just read headings from subjective structural decisions. The text breathes through the accents.

There is one verse I can compare.

Goldingay puts these words in the mouth of Cain as he trudges toward the east in his grief: “My waywardness is too big to carry.” Bray and Hobbins, trusting Tyndale but also the connotations of the Hebrew naśa, render Genesis 4:13 as “My iniquity is too weighty to be forgiven.”

My version is:
And Cain said to Yahweh,
Greater is my iniquity than I can bear.

Notice that there is a rest on Yahweh even in the midst of a verse on unbearable sin.

Genesis 4:13

I could not use big since I reserved it for הרה (big with child). Waywardness seems an unnecessary synonym for iniquity. I also used wayward extensively in Proverbs for הפך. Forgiven is a step too far. Yes, נשא has the dominant sense of lifting up. But forgiveness is an interpretation imposed, rather than a reading of what is there. If one uses forgive here, what will one use for סלח, the stem with the dominant sense of forgive?

James Howell praises the use of the Leningrad codex. It is certainly useful and has been my source for the most part, but for the music it is not the best source we have. That is the Aleppo codex, unfortunately not quite complete and not available in Unicode.

Whoever does the Unicode, try and avoid using a metheg. It cannot be distinguished from a silluq and the two are functionally different. The silluq is a shift to e as a reciting note, or the final cadence in a verse. The metheg is a vowel sound marker. Lambdin explains three conflicting uses of metheg, (page xxvii - a perpetually perplexing page) but he does not know about the music. I find the metheg useless. Later editions include more and more of them, seriously compromising the music by drawing it back to the tonic prematurely. I taught my music algorithm to avoid it with a little fuzzy logic.