Bible Gateway is one of the top destinations for different translations of the Bible. It has also announced that the widely-anticipated updated NIV translation (the so-called “2011” edition) will first be available on its website. So its new Perspectives in Translation blog, a joint project with The Gospel Coalition, is sure to receive attention. The…
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From the About page comes this great question: This may be more of a philosophical/historical question than a linguistic one, but how would you render the word usually given as “vanity” in Ecclesiastes? Abstract nouns are notoriously difficult to track even within a language — “nobility” now is not what it was — but how…
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Different communities have different styles of conveying information. I think this is particularly important for understanding and translating the Bible. I recently posted some thoughts about prophecies (and why they don’t “come true” in the NT). Along the way, the idea of a proof text came up. In particular, I claimed that one style of…
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What happens to prophecies in the New Testament? The obvious answer is that they come true, but I think a more careful look shows otherwise. Matthew 1:18-22 / Isaiah 7:14 As an example of a prophecy apparently coming true, we might consider the first chapter of Matthew. The text starting around Matthew 1:18 deals with…
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The CEB blog has an interesting post about reading levels. In particular, Paul Franklyn claims that “[r]eading measurements are a measure of the writer’s clarity.” The CEB, he claims, aims for a 7th-8th grade reading level not because of their readers’ intelligence, but because the editors of the CEB wanted to create a translation that…
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The question of how much original linguistic structure should be preserved in a translation has come up twice recently — on BBB and on Bill Mounce’s blog. Bill Mounce notes that most people’s gut-reaction is that, “[a]n accurate translation is … one that reflects the grammar of the Greek and Hebrew.” (Dr. Mounce seems to…
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A classic bit of self-contradictory writing advice goes back to William Safire in the 1970s: “Always pick on the correct idiom.” In English, “pick on” means to annoy, and the right phrasing here is “pick” (which means “choose”). What makes his example work is that the meaning of “pick on” doesn’t come from the meanings…
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From the About page comes a question about baptism, the essence of which is the observation that the words we now translate “baptize,” “baptism,” “[John the] Baptist,” etc. were actually ordinary words in Greek, like our “wash” in English. They were not technical religious terms like the English “baptize,” and the Greek words did not…
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Give Ear At BBB, Wayne notes the oddity of the English phrase “give ear” for the Hebrew he’ezin. I think it can be useful to look at what went wrong here. The Root of the Problem Hebrew has at least two words for “hear/listen.” The first is shama. We find it, for example, in the…
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I’ve just returned from my summer break, so I’ll be posting regularly again and also catching up on the questions from the About page. I’ll start with Rabbi Morton Kaplan, who asks simply, “What is the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton?” I’ve already explained a bit of the background. I have more information in my…
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