Perhaps the biggest translation mistake I’ve seen is relying too closely on word-internal structure to figure out what words mean. We saw this last week with toldot and in a comment regarding etymology. I call this the trap “word-internal structure” (even though it applies to phrases, too). English As usual, we can look at modern…
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Last month, Bill Mounce, C. Michael Patton, and Clayboy all alluded to the issue of etymology, which is surely one of the biggest translation traps (and important enough that I devote considerable attention to it in my And God Said). Etymology is really fun. Tracing a word’s winding history, seeing how meanings mutated, and learning…
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Mark 15:9 demonstrates how translation can make people forget their own grammar. A curiosity of English generally prevents anything from appearing between a verb an its object. This is why “I saw yesterday Bill” is such an awkward sentence in English. (It’s fine in French, Modern and Biblical Hebrew, Greek, and many other languages.) Yet…
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The KJV popularized the tradition of using italics to mark the English words of a translation that are not actually in the original Hebrew or Greek (or Aramaic) of the Bible. But I think this typographic custom creates the false impression that translation words come in two varieties, with the first kind supposedly representing words…
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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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