Bible Translation: Key to Understanding the Scriptures
by Dr. David Burke
Dean, The Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship
The American Bible Society
| The books of the Bible were composed during a time span that is now approximately 2000 to 3000 years ago. The writers of these books wrote in Hebrew and Aramaic (Old Testament) and in koine Greek (New Testament). The content of the Bible comes from a time and culture (the Ancient Near East) that is very distant, from a thought-world that is very remote (e.g., the three-story conceptualization of the universe) and in languages that are ancient and far from common knowledge. It is a curious fact that, even though the script is still the same, for modern Greeks the Greek of the New Testament has to be translated in contemporary Greek because the language has evolved so much and vocabulary which was common 2000 years ago has disappeared. Users of English can perhaps grasp this when they see a copy of Beowulf or something else in Middle English and cannot even recognize it as English. The question, then, is: How can these books of the Bible continue to speak inspiringly to generation after generation, given all these barriers to communication? History has born witness to the hundreds of thousands of persons who have experienced the power of God to speak to them through the words of Scripture, and whose lives were renewed or changed as a result. We share today very little information that people of Bible times took for granted, and know little of the nuances of their languages and cultural touchstones. But what enables us to bridge these barriers and understand the words of the Bible is the careful work of Bible translators. What Bible translators are trying to do is to convey the meaning of the Bible’s original language texts in the best and most communicative forms possible. The critical task of Bible translation is to bring the thoughts, idioms, concepts and images from ancient times and languages into modern language forms that will communicate clearly and understandably for modern people. And this is no small task. Some people today become worried when they see a new translation in English that does not look like the King James Version, and they accuse translators of “changing the words of the Bible.” This seems to be one of the most commonly held misperceptions about what happens in the process of translating the Bible—that “the words of the Bible” exist in an English text base, which should not be messed with. But nothing could be further from the truth. All the words of the Bible exist in the hundreds of ancient manuscript copies in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek from earlier times. No one is changing those words as they are preserved in the ancient texts. What Bible translators do is to convey the meaning of those original language Scripture texts as clearly as possible into a language people speak today. |
In essence, there are two basic approaches to translation: one valuing most highly a literal replication of word-equivalents and forms, and the other valuing clarity of meaning in the receptor text. Some have characterized this as preserving the “foreignness” of the ancient text in the translated text over against “domesticating” the text (making the text “speak” more clearly in terms we understand). This is more complex than is usually assumed and most Bible translators work within a continuum between literal and functional meaning equivalents. For example, in 1 Peter 1.13, “Gird up the loins of your minds” is a literal, word-for-word match to the Greek text. Surely that means it is accurate, but most readers have no idea what that means. What is “accuracy” if it can’t be understood? If the audience this aims for is perhaps a classroom or discussion group interested in how the New Testament uses military metaphors, this could be a helpful translation, but in need of unpacking by a subject-matter expert. If the audience is ordinary readers, interested in learning from Scripture but with little background in it, a meaning-based translation may be much more significant, e.g., “prepare your minds for action.”
Both the ancient text and language of the modern reader must be highly valued in the translation process. The above example demonstrates something of the daunting nature of this task of transferring meaning across the enormous language and culture gap from the ancient biblical texts into the most natural and understandable English sentence structure and wordings.
The work of Bible translators is vitally important as attitudes and concepts from the ancient time of the Scriptures are brought forward from their original settings to our own day. It is a very challenging, but essential, task in making the Word of God come alive for us today.
Excerpted from the opening Editorial of
Catholic International: The Documentary Window on the World
Translation and Interpretation
Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2002)