Author Archives: Dannii

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 (29)

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)

In which I rant about paraphrases

November 6, 2010 – 8:03 am

paraphrase n. a restatement of a text in different words, often to clarify meaning [Wiktionary] a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form [Merriam-Webster] A rewording of something written or spoken by someone else, esp. with the aim of making the sense clearer; a free rendering of a passage. [...]

Posted in Bible Translation, Bible versions, revision, translation philosophy | Comments (29)

In which I ask if there’s any value to conveying morphosyntax

November 4, 2010 – 1:40 am

There are many things people to use describe translations: literal, formal, functional, dynamic, idiomatic, figurative, literary, interpretative, accurate, thought-for-though, word-for-word, relevant, paraphrase. Most of these suck. Most of them are almost entirely useless in my opinion. They get so misused and everyone uses them in their own subtly different way. Instead I think it’s much [...]

Posted in Bible Translation, essentially literal, literal translation, translation equivalence, word for word | Comments (11)

Murrkurn murrkurn

October 9, 2010 – 4:32 am

I’m going to try something a bit different today. Linguists love puzzles, so I’m setting you all one. Here is a section of text in Walmajarri, a language you are probably unfamiliar with. I’ve included morpheme glosses so you can have a hope of understand it (mouseover for even more info), but please also ask [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (20)

In which the jargon takes over

September 16, 2010 – 6:05 am

In general I don’t like Biblish – it’s not the language I speak nor is it the language of those I’d hope to introduce to God. Biblish is marked by strange or ungrammatical language choices and is often insensitive to idioms. And it’s vocabulary? Obscure, transliterated, oblivious to polysemy and maybe even archaic. But over [...]

Posted in common language, jargon, natural English, sacred language | Comments (26)
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