In America, there are currently three English translations of the Bible that are the most heavilly read by laymen:
The King James Version (KJV)
The New Internatnal Version (NIV)
The New American Standard Bible (NASB)
Some other significant notables that heavilly circulate in America include:
The Living Bible
The Jerusalem Bible
The Amplified Bible
The Full Life Bible
There are "types" of Bibles
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interlinnear Bibles will compare one translation to another, side-by-side on the same page (so you will literalty have two or sometimes even three or four translations all under one book cover)
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devotional Bibles will have "thoughts for the day" peppered throughout for meditaton and reflection
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margin Bibles have huge wide margins that are completely blank to allow you to scribble your own margin notations
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transliteral Bibles have the original Greek and Hebrew on the page for you along side the English translation
When it comes to trying to determine if a Bible is "any good," some of the criteria looked at include the following:
1) How many scholars sat on the translation committee? (If it was a small number of scholars, or even just one person, then the translation will likely be heavilly skewed toward a more narrow opinion of things. The Dake translation is an execellent example of a disturbingly narrow focus in a translation.) The King James Bible had several hundred translators working on it all at once for many years. As did the New International Version. (One long-standing urban legend holds that William Shakesspeare was one of the KJV translators and that he hid little jokes in the Book of Psalms--and THAT urban legend pre-dates "The DaVinci Code" by many decades.)
2) What is the education level of each member of the scholarship comittee? How many of them have formal training in ancient languages? How biased are their theological standings? Is there a broad representation of varying opinions amogst the committee members?
3) Which base-texts was the translation derrived from? (The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and the New Testament was written in Greek. However, there IS an ancient translation of the Old Testament that was translated FROM Hebrew INTO Greek back in the very early part of the First Milennium. That document is called the Septuigant. Some modern translation refer to the Septuigint. Meanwhile the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls have become an important reference since the 20th Century.)
I rank the Top Three as follows:
King James is the most poetic. It's also been the most heavilly-quoted down through the centuries. Therefore, when someone tries to quote or somehow invoke a Bible passage, going for the King James will ring more bells in people's minds than any other version. This is especially important for a writer to consider, especially a speechwriter or a scriptwriter whose end-product is HEARD rather than READ.
New American Standard Bible is the most literal translation. Far more literal on a word-for-word basis than most others.
The New International Version is the most accessible for multiple cultures using contemporary English. It was translated (back in the 1970's, so it's a VERY recent translation) with an eye toward the diversity found in the current global usage of the English language. The word "bold" for exmaple means "brave" here in America, but in England "bold" means "cheeky." So in the NIV the word "bold" has been replaced by the word "courageous" so that both American and British readers could get the same meaning from the same passage. Many other such globally-minded substitutions have been achieved in the NIV.
I have a bias toward the NIV myself. But I own a King James and refer to it for the poetry.
My absolute favorite web site when I am trying to find a verse that I can't remember is:
http://bible.com/
They have an awesome search feature and you can compare one translation to another.
