Instead, paraphrase Bibles are typically retellings (or paraphrases), of other translations that have the goal of being as understandable as possible. Apart from the spectrum, there are also paraphrase Bibles. Now, with all that said, I should also mention that there is one other kind of Bible that does not deal with this translation predicament. That said, almost none of the Bibles you would look to purchase are fully on one side of this spectrum or the other, instead, most try to find a sweet spot between understandability and accuracy in their translation. August Konkel (the man who officiated my wedding, so I’ll admit a bit of bias here), was a Mennonite pastor for many years before he felt called to get his doctorate, to which after obtaining it, he worked in the field of Old Testament studies as a professor for decades, earning a reputation for quality work from his peers both in academia and the Church.Įvery Bible you will encounter finds itself somewhere on this translation spectrum, from very textually accurate to very meaning accurate. For example, the translator for the Book of Job in the New Living Translation, Dr. Thankfully, the people doing these translations are almost always the best of the best. The trade-off of this approach (beyond losing some of those aforementioned word choices) is that in order to translate a Bible like this, the translator often needs to make a number of theological and historical decisions as to what they understand the writers of the Bible to actually mean. Unsurprisingly, these Bibles are typically considered to be more readable than those produces with the other translation philosophy. On the other end of this translation spectrum are Bibles that try to focus on conveying accurately the meaning of the original, often at the expense of accuracy in the words used. However, an advantage to this method of translation is that often the biblical writers chose words somewhat particularly, and while not perfectly preserving their writing technique, this style of translation does a better job at getting these word choices across. Beyond this, there are some figures of speech and idioms that will make less sense in this method of translation, not because they are translated poorly, but instead because they are not common phrases used today. But know that in doing this, the finished translation will likely sound unnatural or wooden to an English speaker, possibly even bordering on confusing, requiring multiple passes to make sense of it. If in your translation, you choose to focus on being accurate in bringing across (as best as possible) the actual words used, this is something you can do. Do you want to translate in a way that focuses on the accuracy of the words used, or do you want to translate in a way that focuses on the accuracy of the meanings those words were originally trying to convey? What all these issues mean, is that when translating the Bible, a decision needs to be made by the translators before a single word makes it across. Obviously, the world has changed a lot in that time! This is a problem that presents a very real problem when it comes to Bible translation, as often figures of speech and idioms are drawn from the world around us, and the world of the Bible predates us by 2000 to 3000 years. If I were to say, “it is hot like a sauna today”, for someone else to understand that figure of speech would require them to first know what a sauna is, or else that saying will make no sense to them. Not just in the sense that each has different words, but also each language is different in how it is structured, the range of meaning its words occupy, and perhaps the biggest factor being differences amongst how it uses figures of speech and idioms. And so, for us English speakers today who are not wanting to learn how to read these dead languages ourselves, we are left dealing with the imprecise art of translation. To complicate matters, each of these languages has long since stopped being written in or even spoken. Instead, it was written in three languages: Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Bible was not originally written in English (nor German as my grandfather used to joke). Today, anyone looking for a Bible either in paper or online has more options to choose from than they likely even know what to do with! And so to address this, with today’s post I hope to explain why that is, as well as provide a bit of a guide to help you choose which Bible best matches your needs. There is a common question among English speaking Christians that I find myself being asked fairly regularly, “What translation should I use?” Gone are the days when the debate amongst churches was whether to promote the New International Version or King James Version of the Bible for use among its members.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |