If you think the Hebrew refers to the totally of God’s creative work, both the earth, the heaven(s), the underworld, the physical, the metaphysical, the spiritual, the holy and the demonic, then The Message conveys that quite well.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t make The Message a good translation. It makes it a nice elucidation (perhaps), or a nice commentary (perhaps), but I don’t think that explaining what the text refers to is the job of the translation.

This is not the only case of disagreement about how to use the word “translation.”

There’s a movement underfoot to create a “conservative translation” of the Bible. (The program has been widely mocked, but it’s for real, and a lot of serious people are involved.)

Similarly, a common theme among Bible translators is to decide a priori how complex the English should be. In the same thread in which I mentioned The Message, Dannii noted (correctly in my opinion) that that version is “is written in a low, conversational register” which “obscures the differences in genre and register between books and passages,” to which Peter Kirk added (also correctly in my opinion) that “most other English Bible translations are written in a consistently formal and high level register, marked all the more by the presence of obsolescent words and syntax,” so they do the same.

At issue, I think, is two different ways people use the word “translation.” When I use it, I mean an English rendition that as closely as possible captures the Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic of the original.

Some people use the same word “translation” to mean any English publication that is based (closely enough?) on the original. So I would say that The Message is a paraphrase, not a translation, while they would say that it is translation that’s a paraphrase. Similarly, a conservatized or simplified or archaicized volume that means sort of what the Bible does might be, for them, a “translation.”

It’s not up to me to tell people how to use words, so they are free to keep using “translation” however they like. But I think it’s important to keep the difference clear.

I also wonder how close the English has to be to be called a “translation” even under the broader use of the word.

Can a book report be a translation?

Actually, “yes” and “no” are sometimes tricky, because they work differently in different languages.

In particular, negative questions are a common source of trouble. For example, in response to “do you want ice cream?” the answer “no” indicates no desire for ice cream, and “yes” indicates the opposite, a desire for ice cream. But in response to the negative question “you don’t want ice cream?” the answer “no” still indicates no desire for ice cream, while “yes” is a bizarre, ambiguous response among adult speakers. Similarly:

John: “You’re not flying to England?”

Mary: “Yes.”

leaves open both the possibiliy that Mary is flying to England and the possibility that she is not.

In Japanese, the situation is reversed. The answer hai (“yes”) to a positive question means “yes, I do,” but in response to a negative question it means, “yes, you are right that I do not.” So someone who does not want ice cream will respond to “you don’t want ice cream?” in Japanese with hai. (You can see how negotiating Toyota Land Rover import agreements could get tricky.)

It seems that Greek works like English, with “no” confirming a negative question. But “yes” in Greek negates a negative quesion, rather than leaving it ambiguous.

This is a problem in translating Matthew 17:25. In Matthew 17:24, Peter is asked, “does your teacher not pay taxes?” The answer should be “yes, he does,” in English. But the KJV, ESV, and NAB (surprisingly) go with just “yes,” mimicking the Greek but not answering the question in English.

(French has three words with which to answer questions: non, which means “no”; oui, for “yes” in response to positive questions; and si for “yes” in response to negative questions. But only some of the French versions go with si here.)

So, unfortunately, many translations leave the question unanswered here.

Clearly some of the issues are different: Unlike children, adults with poor reading skills may still be able to understand the adult topics of the Bible. (Barrenness was one example I gave regarding children.) Reading skills may or may not correlate with aural comprehension. And so forth.

But in many ways the two questions are alike. Should poor readers be given the impression that it doesn’t take much to understand the Bible? Is there merit to teaching people that they will understand the Bible better if they learn to read better? Can the messages of the Bible be accurately conveyed in 7th-grade-level writing?

Does the Bible have an inherent reading level? (I think it must — though I think it varies from passage to passage.) And if so, isn’t the reading level of an accurate translation already determined by the original text?

In addition to their specific meanings, terms of art are generally frozen phrases. So, for example, “art term” doesn’t mean at all what “term of art” means (even though “art work” is a lot like “work of art”).

Terms of art create a double translation challenge (as, really, does everything that is to be translated). They have to be identified and understood, let’s say in Greek, and then rendered accurately in translation, say, in English.

As is frequently the case, an example from modern languages may help demonstrate the point. (I’ll use American English and Israeli Hebrew only because I happen to speak those two languages.) In English we have a phrase “third party,” as in, for example, “third party liability insurance.” In Hebrew, that’s called tzad gimel, literally, “side gimel,” (gimel is the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet.)

(The “third party” is someone injured by the insured who is not a party to the insurance contract. The insured is the “first party” and the insurer is the “second party.”)

Translating tzad gimel into American English requires knowing something about the insurance industries in Israel and the U.S., in addition to a familiarity with the terms of art in the two languages.

These facts also mean that the Hebrew tzad should usually be translated “side,” but in certain narrow contexts, the only right translation is “party.”

In fact, tzad gimel is an easy case because English has a matching term of art.

What happens when the target language doesn’t have anything that matches the original?

I think that sarx and simeion are two good examples.