Exodus 15:22-26 deals with drinking water. The People of Israel come to Marah (the name of a place, but the word also means “bitter”) and when they find that the water there is undrinkable, Moses throws a log into the water and it becomes drinkable. It’s a fairly simple concept (thought a complex trick), yet…
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Dr. Jim West’s comment that Jeremiah 25 is a good litmus test for translation — and his claim that the NLT doesn’t do badly — directed my attention to the NLT’s translation of Jeremiah 25. In light of some resent claims about the disaster in Haiti, Jeremiah 25:7 in the NLT jumped off the page…
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Perhaps because understanding parts of speech is so central to learning a foreign language, translators often try to preserve parts of speech when they translate. But I think this is a mistake. We know from modern languages that parts of speech often have to change in translation, and I think we see cases where more…
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I saw the following on the NLT website (my emphasis): I found out that I had a lot to learn from the God of my New Living Translation Study Bible […] Why didn’t I discover this about him earlier? I had allowed my pride and prejudice to cloud my judgment. The kind of pride that…
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In my last post I asked whether we should use modern terms like “womb” and “stomach” to translate the ancient beten, which was used for both. Similarly, what about “chair” and “throne”? It seems that, at least in the OT, one word was used for both different modern concepts. The Hebrew for both is kisei.…
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Adjectives without nouns are quirky and idiosyncratic, and understanding them is important for translation. As an example, in English we have “the Americans” (American people) but not (*)”the Swisses,” or (*)”the Frenches.” We have “the Swiss” (Swiss people) and “the French” (French people), but “the American” can only mean one person. Other languages work differently.…
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