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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Understanding English Bible Translation: The Case for an Essentially Literal Approach. By Leland Ryken. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009. Pp. 205. $12.99.) Understanding English Bible Translation is an important book. It is published by Crossway, which also publishes the popular English Standard Version (“ESV”) translation of the Bible. And it was authored by Leland Ryken,…
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Gender, and in particular the gender implications of anthropos, have come up over and again recently (for example, my posts here and here, some great information from Suzanne here, and a response by Peter here). I hope to have time in a few days to prepare a fuller post with a little more background and…
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Still with the goal of providing a solid framework for understanding gender and translation, here’s another example from Modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew has two ways of expressing the generic “you” of English (as in, “you shouldn’t put your elbows on the dinner table,” which means “one shouldn’t….”). The first is a plural masculine verb with…
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Bob MacDonald asks on the About page: Here’s a question — what about that word et? Here it is as preposition (Genesis 4:1): kaniti ish et YHWH, (“I acquired a man with the LORD”). While I would not normally translate it when it is an object marker (it seems unnecessary most of the time it…
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We have an expression in English: “I could care less.” And what’s funny about the saying is that it seems like it should be “I couldn’t care less.” The image is of something about which I care so little that there is no way I could care less. I imagine two approaches to translating that…
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In a comment to Mike Aubrey’s post on Dynamic Equivalence, Davis asks: Do you think a lot of this misunderstanding in the method of translation comes from a shallow understanding of the original languages? Since most people are trained to basically decode a sentence into English, instead of actually learning the languages so that they…
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Even gender-accurate translations retain “son” and “man” in the phrase “the Son of Man,” presumably because it has become a fixed phrase. They do this even though most people recognize that anthropos (“man”) means “humankind” in the phrase, and that uios (“son”) is at least potentially inclusive, even if it refers to a specific male.…
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Thanks to A.Admin on Aberration blog for pointing out the recently posted FAQ about the revisions to the (T)NIV. Gender Of the 31 questions in the FAQ, 7 are specifically about gender, and another few are about “flashpoints” (their word and their scare quotes) — presumably gender and the word sarx — in the translation.…
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