Some people are not aware that Byington wrote a brief review in 1955 in The Christian Century following the release of Volume II of the NWT OT. I do not have a scan of the original article:
New World Old Testament
New World Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Vol. II, AD. 1955. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, $1.50.
By the present plan this volume is the second of four; the third is to end with the Song of Solomon, the fourth with Malachi. The New World Bible Translation Committee, set in its ways, goes on as it began, so that my review of Vol. I, in The Christian Century for Oct. 7, 1953, will serve for Vol. II - including the note that an ordinary bookstore may need to charge you a few cents more than you would pay on a direct mail order or by getting the book from a Jehovah's Witness canvasser.
Yet continued experience has brought some changes. The translators have begun putting brackets around those words (not numerous) which they acknowledge not to be Hebrew but to be added for the sake of clearness. They have grown more careful to distinguish sentences where in Hebrew the subject comes before the verb from those where the Hebrew verb precedes the subject; they judge that putting the subject first means greater emphasis on the subject, and they undertake to express this emphasis in English in different ways, often by adding "himself" after the subject, which is likely to strike a reader as one of the mannerisms of the translation. This increases what was already one of the translation's greatest faults, its prolixity. Nevertheless, though the committee has bound itself to dance in fetters, practice has taught it to dance more freely therein, and this second volume is more readable and vivid than the first.
So reread the aforesaid review of Vol. I, and take here a sample of the New World Translation in its present stage of development:
As Obadiah continued on his way, why, there was Elijah to meet him. At once he recognized him and fell upon his face and said: "Is this you, my lord Elijah?" At this he said to him, "It is I. Go, say to your lord, 'Here is Elijah.’” But he said: "What sin have I committed that you should be putting your servant into the hand of Ahab to put me to death? As Jehovah your God is living, there is not a nation or kingdom where my lord has not sent to look for you. After they had said, 'He is not [here],' he made the kingdom and the nation swear that they could not find you. And now you are saying, 'Go, say to your lord, "Here is Elijah,”’ And it is bound to occur that, when I myself go from you, then the spirit of Jehovah itself will carry you away to where I shall not know, and I shall have to come to tell Ahab and he will not find you, and he will be bound to kill me, as your servant himself has feared Jehovah from his youth."
STEVEN T. BYINGTON
The Christian Century, October 5, 1955 p. 1146