Author Archives:

Report on divine familial terms

May 3, 2013 – 11:13 am

Last year we raised the issue some translators in Isalmic contexts have faced in deciding how to translate the divine familial terms. The World Evangelical Alliance convened an independent panel to consider the issue. The panel has just completed their report, which you can download from their webpage. If you’re interested, it’s worth checking out the whole […]

Posted in news | Tagged | Comments (1)

Five More Myths by Dan Wallace

January 2, 2013 – 11:13 am

Dan Wallace looks at five myths about Bible translations and textual criticism: The Bible has been translated so many times we can’t possibly get back to the original. Words in red indicate the exact words spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Heretics have severely corrupted the text. Orthodox scribes have severely corrupted the text. The deity of […]

Posted in Bible Translation, Link | Leave a Comment

Out of the mouth of babes

October 18, 2012 – 5:36 am

A friend asked me about these two verses, and I don’t believe that we’ve looked at them before: Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes (Psalm 8:2a, ESV) And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing […]

Posted in Bible Translation | Tagged , , | Comments (13)

NIV11 review by Rodney Decker

March 14, 2012 – 3:00 pm

The NIV translators sought to communicate clearly to their generation. But English stops for no one. Our language has continued to change, and it has changed much more rapidly during the past hundred years than it did in the seventeenth century. The swirling vortex of technological and social transformation that has surrounded us with increasingly […]

Posted in Bible Translation | Tagged , | Comments (19)

Weird books in normal language

April 30, 2011 – 8:22 am

John Hobbins recently commented: It’s important to me that we understand that the Bible is a weird book that teaches things at great odds with the way we believe and the way we do things. A quaint translation like RSV or ESV helps in making that understood. The conclusion many people draw from reading a […]

Posted in Bible Translation, common language, jargon, natural English | Comments (5)

Words to avoid

April 13, 2011 – 2:16 pm

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. (Mark 10:13, ESV) We read this verse in church recently. I had to stop myself from laughing. What’s wrong with it? Any ideas on how could it be translated differently?

Posted in field testing, idiom | Comments (13)

Apostles and missionaries

April 5, 2011 – 12:40 am

I’ve been having an interesting Facebook discussion with a friend, part of which concerns whether the mission word family would be a good translation choice for the ἀποστέλλω word family, and particularly whether missionary is a good choice for ἀπόστολος, which we normally transliterate apostle. What do you think, and why? And if you don’t […]

Posted in Biblish, transliteration | Comments (30)

Defining “general-purpose”

March 6, 2011 – 3:35 am

I used the term “general-purpose translations” before here, but I don’t have a clear definition of what it really means. It feels pretty intuitive to me however. I would classify translations such as the NIV, ESV, NLT, KJV, NKJV, NASB, NET and the Good News (among many many others) as general-purpose translations. The intended audience […]

Posted in Bible Translation, translation audience, translation philosophy, translation purpose | Comments (29)

When the waters don’t stop

January 12, 2011 – 12:16 pm

This blog tends towards the academic and the theoretical. We critique Bibles but rarely post about them devotionally. But let us not forget why we do this – why we bother running blogs like this, why we spend much longer studying the Bible personally, and why some of us have even dedicated our working lives […]

Posted in vernacular | Comments (2)

Layers of language and translation

January 7, 2011 – 1:35 pm

Linguistics is a great thing to study! Anyone who has done a bit of formal study of linguistics will know that it has many sub-fields such as phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. In this post we’re going to dig down through the layers and see how focusing on each layer results in significantly different […]

Posted in ambiguity, Bible Translation, biblical idioms, discourse analysis, ESV, ISV, linguistics, NLT, Pragmatics, semantics | Comments (3)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 152 other followers