Thought you would be interested in this new app just published by Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, UK. The Making of the King James Bible is available now for iPhone, iPad
and Android:

http://apps.toura.com/bodleian-library-at-oxford/the-making-of-the-king-james-bible

Featuring over 60 items from the exhibition, including original and previously unseen manuscripts, the app traces the history of the King James Bible, particularly the role of Oxford, and the influence of the translation in England up to 1769. We’re excited to give users the opportunity to explore such a wide range of original manuscripts.

We would love your feedback and/or any help to get the word out to
interested groups.

Thanks, Andrew

Here’s my point: Utopia was written in Latin; and Erasmus was of course famous for his pure Latin. I think it is safe to say More’s Latin was better than your Portuguese (or my Japanese or Chinese).

More was rather following the custom of his age in translation. But in a way, the same style can be found even today — in genres as varying as the Amplified Bible to commentaries that “explain” a few verses from a poem with a thousand words, when just the poem itself was enough.

Speaking of More, wasn’t his translation method symptomatic of the difference between his Latin and his English? I’m not for a minute minimizing his Latin skills (he like the KJV translators was conversant in Latin) but still his English would have been the deeper language for him and thus more able to be expanded as you’ve shown. I’m a fluent speaker of Portuguese but even so my reservoir of English vocabulary is far deeper.

I think a strength of modern translation theory is the acknowledgment of discourse level features in source and receptor languages that transcend simple concepts of clarity and naturalness.

The KJV’s preface famously snorts disdainfully at those who, for example, want each Hebrew word always to be translated by the same English equivalent. Its question as to whether the kingdom of God consists of words or syllables is essentially a claim that no such thing as an exact translation can exist. Languages are so different that is scarcely possible to find a high degree of overlap, leave alone identity, between either words which express common actions and things or words which express abstract concepts.

But such an observation is relative to what is actually being translated. When a Renaissance translator worked from a normal text it was customary for him to expand, interpolate, and omit, according to his taste and what he assumed the taste of his readers to be. To take an early example, John Skelton — a writer whose language has been illuminating compared to Tyndale’s — was happy, in his translation of Poggio’s Bibliotecha Historica, to expand eight words in his original into a paragraph of nearly two hundred words. (See N. Davis, Tyndale’s English of Controversy, reprinted from his March 4, 1971 lecture at University College, London). Even when the translator was prepared to follow his original closely, his normal practice was to make the English version explanatory rather than imitative. A widespread element, for instance, was the use of doublets and triplets to render one word in the original. Tyndale’s contemporary, Sir Thomas More, used doublets even when he was translating his own wriging: comparing the English version of his History of King Richard III with the Latin version, his editor Richard Sylvester comments:

“English doublets abound in the History . . . . More will write ‘bolde and hardye’ for the Latin ‘promptus’ . . . and ‘royall estate, preeminence and kyngdome’ for ‘procurationem’.”

It tells us something about More’s attitudes to Bible translation that he often adopted the same principle when he put a Bible verse into English; to take an extreme example, in his Dialogue of Comfort he rendered the Vulgate’s translation of Psalm 17:15 like this:

Vulgate: satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua

More: I shall be satiate, satisfied, or fulfilled, when thy glory, good Lord, shall appear.

Despite More’s abuse, Bible translation was crucially different from other forms of translation. Not only were there no substantial additions to the original, or omissions from it — to have made either would have been a tinkering with God’s word — but at the level of sentence and clause translators did their best to maintain a word for word equivalence. No English version maintains the equivalence more strictly than the KJV, but its basis for doing so rests on Tyndale’s example.

Consider the pronoun. Hebrew is a fully inflected language, so that often it uses a separate pronoun for purposes of emphasis, in place of, or as well as, a pronominal suffix. This is not commonly reproducible in translation in a lightly inflected language like English; but where it is possible Tyndale often makes the effort. In Genesis 2:11, for instance, the first of the rivers which runs through the Garden of Eden is described like this, in Tyndale’s version (my italics)

Tyndale: The name of the one is Phison, he it is that compasseth all the land of Hevila.

This goes into the Authorized Version as (original italics, indicating interpolation):

KJV: The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Hevila.

But having reproduced the form once, Tyndale does not bother to do so with the second and third rivers, although the Hebrew also gives them a pronominal emphasis. This is Tyndale’s rendering, followed by the KJV’s where the Hebrew emphasis is maintained:

Tyndale: The name of the second river is Gihon, which compasseth all the land of Inde. And the name of the third river is Hidekell, which runneth on the east side of the Assyrians.

KJV: And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward to the east of Assyria.

In Genesis 20:5 the pronoun is introduced to empahsize the self-righteousness of Abimelech’s claim that in attempting to make Sarah his wife he had been ignorant of her marriage to Abraham. Tyndale conveys the protestation by using “yea” and the reflexive pronoun.

Tyndale: . . . said not he unto me, that she was his sister? Yea, and said not she herself that he was her brother?

The contrast with the Vulgate could hardly be greater, where there is little sense of panic on the speaker’s part:

Vulgate: Nonne ipse dixit mihi: Soror mea est: et ipsa ait:
Frater meus est?

The NIV dissipates the effect by making the husband’s and wife’s statements to Abimelech identical:

NIV: Did he not say to me, “She is my sister,” and didn’t she also say, “He is my brother”?

KJV: Said he not unto me, She is my sister? and she, even she herself said, He is my brother.

Vulgate: Ne timeas eos: Dominus enim Deus vester pugnabit pro vobis.

Luther: Furchtet euch nicht fur inen, denn her Herr ewr Gott streit fur euch.

Tyndale: Fear them not, for the Lord your God he it is that fighteth for you.

KJV: Ye shall not fear them: for the Lord your God he shall fight for you.

The most striking thing about the KJV’s syntax in the Prophetic and Poetic books its extreme fidelity to the original: so much so that individual examples can hardly begin to demonstrate it. This is not always a matter of introducing barbarisms or un-English elements, for the translators find a recognizable native form to reproduce the Hebrew — in achieving this they show that Tyndale’s claim for the English language’s word-for-word closeness to the Hebrew was not so far from the truth as later, more ignorant commentators have claimed.

In my next post, I will show several examples of this.

As to Peter’s claim that the KJV is largely inaccessible to 99% of the population because of “obsolete language”; I am not sure. I would have put the number at 80-90% myself; with the remainder being among the best educated and most influential members of society. As I argue above about the relative difficulty of the KJV and most other literature; Peter’s claim, if true, suggests we require radical revision of our high school and college literature curriculum, dropping not only Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton (all of whom are more complicated than the KJV), but also many contemporary authors who reference the language of the KJV (e.g., Faulkner) or who themselves use complex presentation (e.g., Joyce or Eliot). This is an alien definition of college-preparatory education to me.

This is certainly no longer true to any great degree except in certain regions where the KJV still predominates such as in parts of the American South, or rural, or mountain regions of America, etc. However, as much as I love the KJV since I was brought up on it, I can’t imagine many situations where it would be the Bible that I would give to someone other than for historical or comparative purposes. Irrespective of the beauty of the language of the KJV – and it is undeniably an English Classic and the most influential book in both British and American history – the numerous translation errors in it are also a serious problem. For many people who grew up with the KJV reading a version like the NIV, TNIV or even ESV enables them to make immediate leaps in their biblical understanding.

All further revisions in Tyndale/KJV are better options for understanding the meaning of the Bible and even the better dynamic equivalent versions such as the NIV and TNIV have sought to maintain some continuity with this tradition. Tyndale remains the rightful “father of the English Bible” but surely he would argue for better and better translations to convey the meaning to new generations – in fact, that’s what he gave his own life for.

To what are the KJV translators referring when they say ‘Dragons’ in normal speech (what did common people of 1611 think dragons were?)?

I ask because the KJV uses the word ‘dragon’ in its translation. Is it supposed to be the same thing?

KJV 1611
Bring forth therfore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within your selues, We haue Abraham to our father: For I say vnto you, that God is able of these stones to raise vp children vnto Abraham.

KJV 1769
Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

I believe the 1769 is the version seen on most websites as well as in print these days.

“Abraham to our father” hmmm, that’s got me scratching my head.