Polycarp has some comments about the God’s Word translation, where he quotes a text that refers readers to a PDF called “A Guide to GOD’S WORD Translation: Translating the Bible according to the Principles of Closest Natural Equivalence.” It’s an impressive document. Take a look. Unfortunately, the translation doesn’t always seem to rise the promise…
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Still following up on what Pete Enns said: Second, I would be prepared at how Hebrew does not “behave itself,” i.e., how grammars necessarily abstract the language almost to the point where a fair amount of what you’ve been learning doesn’t correspond to the actual biblical text. More than once I have encountered this sort…
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William Mounce at Koinonia (hosted by Zondervan Academic) disagrees with Mark Strauss about dilogos in I Timothy 3:8. Dr. Strauss takes issue with the ESV’s choice of “double-tongued,” arguing that it “sounds like a mock ‘Indian-speak’ (with forked-tongue) or some strange alien creature,” while Dr. Mounce defends the decision because — in cases like this…
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I’ve seen the word “translation” used (at least) in two different ways. Following a trick I learned from Chomsky, I’ll call them “my way” and “the wrong way.” My Way: A translation of the Bible into English takes the original Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic of the Bible and tries to find the most accurate English to represent it.…
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“Luck” is an interesting word in English, because people can have “good luck” or “bad luck,” but if they are “lucky” it only means “good luck.” That is, the word “luck” can refer to positive or negative things, but in order to mean something negative, it has to be qualified, either explicitly or by context.…
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The terms “dynamic equivalence” and “formal equivalence” mask the fact that at least two distinct theoretical issues separate most translations: 1. what counts as “the same” in translation; and 2. how much text should be translated at a time. Even though the two issues are not the same, they are related, and we find the…
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Bob MacDonald asks on the About page: Tomorrow I teach my five minute Hebrew lesson to children[…] This year I was thinking of learning numbers — starting with one and using the ordinal numbers of Genesis 1-2:4 as a beginning. No wonder I have not learned numbers yet — I have been reviewing Lambdin and…
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Related to my previous post, Douglas Hofstadter discusses (on page 380 of Godel, Escher, Bach) translating a Russian novel into English. He wonders: [B]ut if you translate every idiomatic phrase word by word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is desirable, since the Russian culture is an alien one to speakers of English.…
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It seems that people who frequently read a particular Bible translation generally come to expect a certain “Bible style” that often includes an oddness of vocabulary and syntax. They then associate that oddness with the Bible itself. And because they think that the Bible is odd in the ways that their translation suggests, they refuse…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
