Doug Chaplin has a post about to alpha kai to o[mega], “the alpha and the omega.” This poetic device is technically called a merism — though Doug, being wiser than I, avoids putting “merism” in the title of his post, presumably not wanting to scare readers away before they start reading. (“Young and old” is…
Read more
Polycarp has some comments about the God’s Word translation, where he quotes a text that refers readers to a PDF called “A Guide to GOD’S WORD Translation: Translating the Bible according to the Principles of Closest Natural Equivalence.” It’s an impressive document. Take a look. Unfortunately, the translation doesn’t always seem to rise the promise…
Read more
William Mounce at Koinonia (hosted by Zondervan Academic) disagrees with Mark Strauss about dilogos in I Timothy 3:8. Dr. Strauss takes issue with the ESV’s choice of “double-tongued,” arguing that it “sounds like a mock ‘Indian-speak’ (with forked-tongue) or some strange alien creature,” while Dr. Mounce defends the decision because — in cases like this…
Read more
I’ve seen the word “translation” used (at least) in two different ways. Following a trick I learned from Chomsky, I’ll call them “my way” and “the wrong way.” My Way: A translation of the Bible into English takes the original Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic of the Bible and tries to find the most accurate English to represent it.…
Read more
“Luck” is an interesting word in English, because people can have “good luck” or “bad luck,” but if they are “lucky” it only means “good luck.” That is, the word “luck” can refer to positive or negative things, but in order to mean something negative, it has to be qualified, either explicitly or by context.…
Read more
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…
Read more
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.…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
