Lost in Translation
Introduction
What exactly do I mean when I speak about a Bible Translation? Well the Bible as we know it was actually written many years ago by hand. It may surprise you to find out as well that it was not written in english but parts were written in Hebrew, parts in Aramaic and the new testament in Ancient or Biblical Greek.
The way that we have our english bible today involves a number of scholars getting together to translate the bible from it’s original languages to english (or spanish, or german, or any other language). This final product is known as a bible translation.
Types of Translation
In our discussion here, since this is an english blog, we will only be looking at english translations of the bible.
Sometimes just thinking about the number of english translations is overwhelming. Each bible translation team has used a slightly different method to translate their particular translation, and this is an extremely long and arduous task. As an example, if we look at the TNIV bible, it was translated over 10 years by 13 respected evangelical scholars. Or the NIV bible, which is a very popular translation, took 13 years to translate by the same committee.
Why is it so difficult?
When we think about the bible, we see that the writer is trying to communicate a message to us, the readers. Every message, or communication is encoded into a mechanism of transmitting that message to the person who is to decode that message. If you think about war time when on country wanted to communicate with their troops and they stood the chance of that message falling into the enemy’s hands, they will write the message in such a way that their enemy cannot understand what they are saying. The enemy would then need to employ code crackers who spent their days trying to break down the writing into something which has meaning.
This is the same with the original scriptures. They were written in a language which has a different form to the english language and this sometimes makes it difficult to understand. When you look at the sentences that I have formed here, you will be able to derive their meaning since you understand the english form. Although meaning is common through most languages, Form can be totally different for most languages. As an example, let’s look at the greeting “Good Morning”. If I say to you good morning, that generally means that I wish you to great you in the morning and wish you a good morning. In Hebrew however, the exact same greeting would be “boqer tov”, which literally means “morning good”. The meaning of this greeting is the same as in English, however the form of the sentence is totally different.
Another problem is that sometimes the same word , can express different meanings. An example is the word “mean”, you can say “That was no mean (insignificant) accomplishment” or “Those clouds mean (are a sign of) rain” and many other ways of using simply that one word. The diffuculty in Bible translation is that the translator has to transform the words from one language into another, without altering the meaning of the words in any way, and that is why we have so many different translations, because some translators have done a word for word translation trying to alter the form of the message as little as possible while still trying to keep the message understandable, while some translators have taken things into their own hands and tried to interpret the scriptures for you in their translations.
Next in this series
In the next post I will look at specific types of bible transalations, and we will see how the mean and form of a translation affects the ease of use of the bible.
JMR is a guy with a passion for a true understanding of God's Word. He came to Christ around 2000 when a friend at work shared his faith.
God's word is commonly misunderstood today, partly because of teachers who do not understand the bible themselves, and partly because we who listen do not test what those teachers say against the Word of God.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 "Test all things; hold fast what is good"