The Bible Keeps Getting Translated into English - Again and Again and Again...

[MineralMan]

For people interested in such things, it's fun to compare different translations of key portions of the New Testament in particular. Different translations make subtle changes to suit a particular set of doctrines for one particular denomination or group of denominations. In other cases, the translation attempts to recast the text into language that is more easily understood than the 17th Century English of the King James version. Below, I digress for a time:

Almost 50 years ago, I met a Russian immigrant poet, an older man who fled the Soviet Union after WWII. As a poet myself who had enjoyed some publication of my work, we met in a group that discussed poetry. He was surprised to learn that I could speak and read Russian, thanks to the USAF, which gave me an excellent education in that language.

His English was not fluent. He asked if I would consider translating his poems into English. I agreed to do that, as long as we could do it working closely together on each poem. Then, I asked him whether he wanted his poetry to read well as poetry in English or if he wanted to have it be a more direct, literal translation that ignored poetic forms to some degree. "Can we do both?" he asked. I said that we could do that as we worked, and then decide which version was more effective.

The thing about poetry is that it often takes liberties with language and even more often plays on words and idiomatic expressions to convey its meaning. Russian is rich in idioms, most of which are old, localized, and meaningless to English speakers, since we do not share the history and environment that generated them. In the end, the poet chose the translations that converted Russian idioms to English equivalents, rather than the translations that retained the literal meaning of the Russian idioms. Now, back to the bible:

Translating the Bible has some of the same problems. The source texts are written in ancient Greek and Hebrew, for the most part, with some Aramaic texts thrown in for good measure. Modern translators actually cannot turn to living speakers of either of those languages, as I could with my Russian friend. They can't ask, "Exactly how was this understood at the time it was written?" In many cases, the answer is not known. The cultures have changed in dramatic ways. It's a knotty problem, which rarely is solved satisfactorily.

Judaism and Christianity are ancient religions. They developed in a time that was so different from our own that we cannot understand exactly the environment that existed. We cannot trek across the Middle East with our goats and huts, listening to stories and oral histories around the evening fire. We cannot live the language used in old texts.

Because we don't have that experience, we cannot really do accurate translations that truly convey the original meaning. it is a problem. It is a problem with no ideal solution. Too much time has passed.