One problem that pastors and amateur translators in general face is the rigidity of grammatical categories. Example: a preacher I know once tried to make Matthew 15:26 seem less harsh by appealing to the fact that the word for dogs there is diminutive. He explained that it was actually “little dogs,” — indoor pets.

Although the diminutive can make a distinction in actual size, and can at times be used purely for affection, at other times it’s used with no significant difference in meaning. Eriphos (goat) and eriphion (“little goat”) are used interchangeably, for instance, in Matthew 25:32-33 and also in Tobit 2:12-13.

Still I’ll take referential accuracy over literary quality any day, if I have to make a choice.

I appreciate that it’s hard to sort out of the welter of voices which are the ones to listen to. I personally tend to discount anyone’s opinion who proposes litmus tests or otherwise thinks that accuracy is a matter of getting some single issue right — like gender matters in translation. There’s not just one place where the issues lie. They are strewn across the pages of Scripture.

Sorry if that’s not enough help.

For my own study I have long used the NIV/Message with the Greek near by, but since I got my iPhone there is a bilingual version with the Greek and I’m reading mostly from the Greek for study purposes. Probably not for everyone.

1. How do I, or anyone without good knowledge of the original languages (and, as you suggest, that means a lot more than just elementary Greek teaching) decide what is a good translation and what is not? The choices are there and seem likely to remain there for a long time, so how should I evaluate them with fairly limited knowledge?

2. When scholars disagree on what the actual meaning of a text is, how do I as a layman decide what I should believe the text says. I believe (and hope) that most of the major translation committees have people on them who meet your criteria of understanding the Biblical Greek as another language, and yet they will have different readings. I’m sure some of the choices are theological and some are based on not breaking with established traditions and so forth, but that’s not my point. The point is how do I decide which interpretation to favour? (or should I even try to do this without the knowledge, since part of the contention seems to be that the translator should be making such decisions as the one best qualified to?)

Even the criteria of sounding like a pithy English translation doesn’t necessarily help me if I find two translations which sound like reasonable English, but which seem to have quite different meanings.

I could just give it up and pick a primary version and one or a few comparison versions that for whatever reason I decide to trust, and trust that I get the important parts of God’s message. That is after all what Bible students have done for hundreds of years. I just get this feeling that there must be a better way, though I’m not really sure what it could be.

Do you have any recommendations of particular versions that best meet your principles described here?

On the substantive matters, let me try to answer. Just because languages don’t match one-to-one doesn’t mean there aren’t effective (and often unique) ways to solve identical communicative problems. Put another way, you can tell a good translation when you see it, if you know what you’re looking for.

So last night at the worship service here in Graz, the sermon was on forgiveness and the need for us to forgive one another. At the end of the service the worship leader said:

Bitterkeit ist Unversöhnlichkeit die über Nacht bleibt.

OK, a bit too much, but …

if you want to say that in English, you can’t just copy the German, even though that makes for grammatical English:

Bitterness is unforgiveness that stays over night.

To have it hit you in English the way it hits you in German you have to say:

Bitterness is unforgiveness you let sit over night.

Any thorough bilingual will tell you that the second English sentence is a much better translation than the first.

There is an Englishman who has come to Graz to work in the church and he’s just starting to learn German. We were talking this morning about the experience every adult language learner has at the point they become truly bilingual. At some point, you start hearing what people mean. And it happens quite suddenly. You’re listening really hard, trying to keep up and — bam — you just know what they mean. The words are almost incidental at that point.

Now you don’t understand everything all at once. But there is a quantum leap at some point when understanding becomes automatic for the things you hear all the time. It’s at that point that you stop “translating” like the first English sentence and start interpreting like the second English sentence.

But, you say, we can’t do that for Koine Greek. True. At least true for most people. But my colleagues who are Greek professors talk about that same kind of aha moment, where they are no longer running to keep up but they start knowing what the writers were talking about.

Those are the guys we should be depending on to translate, not the pastors. (BTW, not many teachers of Biblical Greek are at that level.)

And there’s even a way you can pretty well tell for yourself. You can pretty well guess that what the worship leader said was a pithy comment, so the English ought to sound like a pithy comment. The second sentence does, the first doesn’t.

Does any of that help?

especially becuz this wouldn’t happen…

Elizabeth I had her cousin Mary killed.
Elizabeth I had her cousin Mary murdered.
Elizabeth I had her cousin Mary executed.

too many people get to distort the bible’s words… its hard to know what parts to believe…

someone said that the “only begotten son” the begotten wasn’t really there so they don’t have it in RSV… ugh!

I cannot comment on how well we are able to know exactly what something means in the original. What I do know is:
1. The mapping between languages is not one to one (though I’m sure it could be closer than it is in many translations).

2. When different scholars take different views on a passage or on a translation, the “ordinary person” like me doesn’t really have a good idea who to believe and whether it is really certain that the passage means what people say it means and should be translated that way.

Thanks for your interesting, wanting to know what was written previously.