There seem to be times when the translation of a text becomes the text, at least emotionally, if not rationally. This creates a translation dilemma, because it’s hard to fix a bad translation that everyone thinks is the original text. Here are three examples: The “jubilee year,” the 50th year that commemorates the end of…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender, Part II Earlier, I wrote about the difference between grammatical gender and real-world (or semantic) gender. I noted that the former doesn’t always indicate the latter. For example, personne in French is grammatically feminine but semantically inclusive. As promised, here’s a little bit about how to tease the two kinds of…
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A pizzeria in Eilat, Israel, offers plain pizza and “pizza with fungus,” according to the large English menu at the restaurant. Of course they meant not “fungus” but “mushrooms.” Unfortunately, the modern Hebrew for both English words are the same. What went wrong here is mostly a matter of connotation. While mushrooms are indeed a…
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Scot McKnight suggests that, “The sweeping conclusion is this: unless you can read the original languages, you should avoid making public pronouncements about which translation is best.” (emphasis his). This is yet another example of a fundamental dilemma in translation: the only people capable of doing translation don’t need it. More importantly, the only people…
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A post by Polycarp on his blog calls into question John Piper’s demand for a translation “that has all the words.” I frequently find it useful to look at modern languages to see how valid a particular approach to translation is. For example, if I’m translating from French into English, which would I prefer? How…
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On Thursday, I posted about the English translations of near-parellel passages in Mark and Matthew. It got me thinking about Chronicles, which frequently quotes other books such as Kings. II Chronicles 6:1-5, for example, seems to be an update (grammatically and in terms of spelling) of I Kings 8:12-16. In particular, I Kings 8:15 and…
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John Hobbins has an interesting analysis of near-parallel passages in Mark 1:16-18 and Matthew 4:18-20. I’m struck by the fact that I can’t find a translation that makes it possible to follow along in English. (I have a table below.) The KJV, for reasons I can’t fathom, adds the word “Jesus” to Matthew, and it…
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Recents discussions (on Dr. Jim West’s blog, ScriptureZealot, etc.) have focused on what to do with Greek pronouns in English. But the discussion seem to gloss over the fact that subject pronouns are generally missing in Greek. So instead of “he said,” Greek offers us just eipen “said.” It can be “he said,” “she said,”…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender It seems to me that a lot of the confusion about gender and translation stems from a misunderstanding of the two ways that gender works, as I’ll describe here. Two Kinds of Gender On one hand, men are different than women, and we can use the words “gender,” “masculine,” and “feminine”…
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Readers keeping up with the theoretical issues surrounding gender and translation may find this helpful or interesting or both. It’s reposted from my The Glamour of the Grammar column for the Jerusalem Post: Unlike in English, Hebrew nouns, verbs, and adjectives come in two varieties, commonly called masculine and feminine. The endings -a (singular) and…
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