The terms “dynamic equivalence” and “formal equivalence” mask the fact that at least two distinct theoretical issues separate most translations: 1. what counts as “the same” in translation; and 2. how much text should be translated at a time. Even though the two issues are not the same, they are related, and we find the…
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Bob MacDonald asks on the About page: Tomorrow I teach my five minute Hebrew lesson to children[…] This year I was thinking of learning numbers — starting with one and using the ordinal numbers of Genesis 1-2:4 as a beginning. No wonder I have not learned numbers yet — I have been reviewing Lambdin and…
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Related to my previous post, Douglas Hofstadter discusses (on page 380 of Godel, Escher, Bach) translating a Russian novel into English. He wonders: [B]ut if you translate every idiomatic phrase word by word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is desirable, since the Russian culture is an alien one to speakers of English.…
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It seems that people who frequently read a particular Bible translation generally come to expect a certain “Bible style” that often includes an oddness of vocabulary and syntax. They then associate that oddness with the Bible itself. And because they think that the Bible is odd in the ways that their translation suggests, they refuse…
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The first chapter of Jonah contains the verb yarah four times, so we see another example of the tension between local and global translation, or between text and context. What works well verse by verse doesn’t always work to convey a longer passage. In verse 5, the sailors on Jonah’s boat “yarahed” in response to…
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Understanding English Bible Translation: The Case for an Essentially Literal Approach. By Leland Ryken. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009. Pp. 205. $12.99.) Understanding English Bible Translation is an important book. It is published by Crossway, which also publishes the popular English Standard Version (“ESV”) translation of the Bible. And it was authored by Leland Ryken,…
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Gender, and in particular the gender implications of anthropos, have come up over and again recently (for example, my posts here and here, some great information from Suzanne here, and a response by Peter here). I hope to have time in a few days to prepare a fuller post with a little more background and…
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Still with the goal of providing a solid framework for understanding gender and translation, here’s another example from Modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew has two ways of expressing the generic “you” of English (as in, “you shouldn’t put your elbows on the dinner table,” which means “one shouldn’t….”). The first is a plural masculine verb with…
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Bob MacDonald asks on the About page: Here’s a question — what about that word et? Here it is as preposition (Genesis 4:1): kaniti ish et YHWH, (“I acquired a man with the LORD”). While I would not normally translate it when it is an object marker (it seems unnecessary most of the time it…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
