This past July I had the pleasure of presenting at a TEDx conference in East Hampton, the broad theme of which was “The Next Generation.” So I offered an 18-minute segment on Bible translation, on what so often goes wrong with translations, and on how to avoid the common mistakes. I couched these topics in…
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Though the text of the new Common English Bible (“CEB”) has been circulating for some time, its recent release made headlines (Bob Smietana in The Tennessean, picked up by Cathy Lynn Grossman on her USA Today blog), in part because of the translators’ decision to change the traditional “son of man” into “human one.” Why…
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All of my training and experience has taught me that a word-for-word translation is a siren. It has superficial appeal in that intuitively it seems to bring a reader closer to a foreign text, but, in fact, it misconveys the original text. Still, I also believe that it’s important to understand both sides of a…
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David Frank at BBB asks if a translation has to sound like a translation. Not surprisingly when it comes to the Bible, two answers emerged: “yes,” and “no.” David’s point was that a translation into English should sound like English. Bob MacDonald seems to counter that the foreignness is part of the text and a…
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In 2008, as I was writing And God Said, I described the King James Version (KJV) as the “fool’s-gold standard” of English Bible translation. That was approximately 397 years after the watershed publication of the KJV, hardly a date worth noticing. But today the KJV turns 400, and with that anniversary has come renewed world-wide…
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As with words, it makes intuitive sense that a translation should convey the grammar of the original. “Translating the words and grammar separately doesn’t work. They have to be translated together.” But, again, our intuition leads us astray. Here’s an example of what can go wrong if we try to mimic the grammar of one…
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Doug “Clayboy” Chaplin has an interesting post about literal Bible translations. Among other things, he says: There seems to me — behind the so-called “formal equivalence” emphasis on source language syntax something of a hankering for a sacred language. By sacred I mean, in this context, especially appropriate for or capable of being a vehicle…
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