Not long ago, I asked about the merit of tailoring translations to children. When I starting reading about the new CEB translation, and in particular that “[t]he new Bible translation would be pitched at 7th-8th grade reading level (compare 11th-12th grade reading level for the NRSV),” I started thinking about what children’s translations and poor-readers’…
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The first chapter of Jonah contains the verb yarah four times, so we see another example of the tension between local and global translation, or between text and context. What works well verse by verse doesn’t always work to convey a longer passage. In verse 5, the sailors on Jonah’s boat “yarahed” in response to…
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Last week I suggested that imagery can be subjective, varying from culture to culture. Here’s another example. In antiquity, for a person to be “fat” was a good thing, the word essentially representing the opposite of “scrawny.” Every day, modern America produces something like twice the calories that its population needs to thrive, so many…
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On Thursday, I posted about the English translations of near-parellel passages in Mark and Matthew. It got me thinking about Chronicles, which frequently quotes other books such as Kings. II Chronicles 6:1-5, for example, seems to be an update (grammatically and in terms of spelling) of I Kings 8:12-16. In particular, I Kings 8:15 and…
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John Hobbins has an interesting analysis of near-parallel passages in Mark 1:16-18 and Matthew 4:18-20. I’m struck by the fact that I can’t find a translation that makes it possible to follow along in English. (I have a table below.) The KJV, for reasons I can’t fathom, adds the word “Jesus” to Matthew, and it…
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