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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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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We have an expression in English: “I could care less.” And what’s funny about the saying is that it seems like it should be “I couldn’t care less.” The image is of something about which I care so little that there is no way I could care less. I imagine two approaches to translating that…
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In a comment to Mike Aubrey’s post on Dynamic Equivalence, Davis asks: Do you think a lot of this misunderstanding in the method of translation comes from a shallow understanding of the original languages? Since most people are trained to basically decode a sentence into English, instead of actually learning the languages so that they…
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Even gender-accurate translations retain “son” and “man” in the phrase “the Son of Man,” presumably because it has become a fixed phrase. They do this even though most people recognize that anthropos (“man”) means “humankind” in the phrase, and that uios (“son”) is at least potentially inclusive, even if it refers to a specific male.…
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Thanks to A.Admin on Aberration blog for pointing out the recently posted FAQ about the revisions to the (T)NIV. Gender Of the 31 questions in the FAQ, 7 are specifically about gender, and another few are about “flashpoints” (their word and their scare quotes) — presumably gender and the word sarx — in the translation.…
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Hillary Putnam notes that the word “sparrow” refers to a different species in the U.S. and the U.K. (page 22 of Representation and Reality, his superb book about words and meaning). Does this mean that the translation “sparrow” in Psalms, Matthew, and Luke is wrong in the U.S. or the U.K. (or both)?
A comment to Peter Kirk’s discussion of Matthew 12:9-14 drew my attention to a passage from Appendix D of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. In it, Twain writes about his experience with German, and, among things, gender. Here’s part of what Twain writes: See how [this crazy thing called gender] looks in print — I…
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At the end of my discussion of anthropos, I concluded that one meaning of anthropos is “man,” and that we see that meaning in Matthew 12:10. Here I want to suggest that, even so, “man” may not be the best English translation for anthropos. Here’s why. One of my points before was that Greek makes…
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In another discussion of gender, John challenges: “Given something like Acts 7:32 ‘I am the God of your fathers [pateres], the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.’, who would have the burden of proof? Was it the God of Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel? If the one writing this text was of a…
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