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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Genesis 2:7, according to the KJV, has the creation of man “from the dust of the ground.” But why “dust”? The Hebrew here is afar, and it doesn’t seem to mean “dust.” From Genesis 2:7, we know that it’s something on the ground, but we don’t know what. “Dust” is a possibility, just from this…
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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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