| Barry Hufker wrote on Thu, 24 April 2008 18:34 |
For any in this thread looking for shades of meaning in the words as translated into English, may I suggest an "amplified" Bible. Great care is taken there to convey all nuances.
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This gives some indication of what bible translators wrestle with hugely, but it still presents the problem as being rather simple.
What it covers is the semantic side of the issue, where any word will cover a range of meanings, and when you're translating a word into another language you'll find that no single word in the target language covers exactly the same range of meaning. A simple non-biblical example would be the English word "table". I'm sure we're now all thinking of an elevated horizontal surface posed on four feet. The Dutch word for that is "tafel". Simple? Hang on, the word "tafel" is never used to mean a rectangular list of numbers, and neither does it describe the imaginary surface below which ground water is found. The difference gets subtler, when some "tafels" are benches but not all benches are "tafels" etc. Almost no word in one language matches 100% with another word in another language. That means that listing a bunch of possible translations, as the Amplified Bible apparently does, will probably cover the original range of meaning in its entirety,
but will fail to delineate it. The reader is in peril of deducing a meaning which was never meant in the original.
Another complexity that's rarely appreciated (and that I don't see addressed in the Amplified Bible) is grammatical. Not all languages have the same kind of past, present and future tenses. Semitic and Arabic languages use "aspect", denoting whether we're talking about the start of an action, the course of an action (and whether that includes the start, the end or both) or the end of an action, with indications as to actual time given explicitly ("yesterday").
Problems with cultural context in translations should be obvious, but a problem specific to Bible translations is theology. As just one example, whether a translator believes in the holy trinity or not has quite a profound impact on some translations, most notably on the opening verses of the gospel of John.
The upshot is that Bible translations come in a wide variety. In one extreme we find interlinear translations where literal translations (with links to glossary terms to look up the exact scope of each Hebrew or Greek word) are interlined with the Greek or Hebrew original. Such translations are for scholarly use only. Lacking special cultural or linguistic knowledge a layman is guaranteed to misinterpret it. On the other hand an interlinear translation is almost free from translator bias. On the other extreme are heavily reworded bibles for use by the faithful but which are almost specific to denominations. I get the impression the amplified bible targets the ordinary faithful, while staking a claim to the neutrality of an interlinear translation. Instead, it puts the reader at the same risk posed by an interlinear (misinterpreting glosses) whilst not guaranteeing the translator hasn't imported his personal belief into it.
A good read in this respect is "The Role of Theology and Bias in Bible Translation" by Rolf Furuli. The book somewhat tows its own line (that of the Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Translation to be precise), as reflected in its choice of examples, but it is nevertheless very informative if you want to get a sense of the breadth of issues to be dealt with during translation.
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Topic: Fascinating explanation of the human need for god (Read 19505 times)