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King James Bible in National Geographic

December 7, 2011 – 7:33 pm

We here at Better Bibles often say disparaging things about the KJV. There are several reasons. Elizabethan English is hard for modern English speakers to understand, because English has changed so much. (The sticklers will point out that the KJV was written in Jacobean times, but I will respond that the translators were being self-consciously [...]

Posted in KJV | Comments (29)

A Book on Literary Translation

November 4, 2011 – 1:18 am

For those of you who may have missed it, there is a new book on translation out. IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything By David Bellos It was reviewed in the NY Times Sunday Book Review last week. Find the review here. In brief, Bellos, himself a well-regarded [...]

Posted in translation philosophy | Comments (8)

Dynamic Equivalence re-visited

August 30, 2011 – 3:17 am

With the news of Eugene Nida’s passing, it’s worth revisiting the single biggest contribution of his thinking to the field of Bible translation. Nida proposed that the basis of translation should be to replicate the meaning of the original and not necessarily the wording. Dynamic equivalence (also known as functional equivalence) attempts to convey the [...]

Posted in Bible Translation, translation equivalence | Comments (79)

Money, money, money

August 6, 2010 – 7:07 am

This has been a crazy spring and summer — I’m involved in two book projects and I’m still working part time as a dean dealing with student issues. And the dog, sweetheart that she is, still takes up almost two hours of walking time a day. So I haven’t had a lot of time to devote [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (32)

Conferring a degree

January 12, 2010 – 7:30 am

When Nick Bailey asked if I would be on his doctoral committee, I leapt at the chance. I have known Nick for about 25 years now. The story is long and somewhat complicated, but suffice it to say that we met in Germany through a mutual professional acquaintance, and only later discovered that we shared [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (6)

I want a 4G translation

January 2, 2010 – 8:31 pm

A couple of days ago I was out walking our dog, Pixie, when I ran into a neighbor and long time friend, Russ, who was out on a walk. Russ and I have known each other for more than 20 years. We met when I first started going to Berkeley Covenant shortly after moving to [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (19)

Why do we make pastors translate?

December 12, 2009 – 12:14 am

I’m here in Austria at the moment visiting the two sets of friends I have in Graz. One set are associated with the Linguistics department at the Karl Franzens University, including my colleague of longest standing, Bernhard Hurch, who holds the chair, and is arguably the most insightful German-speaking linguist of his generation — and [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (15)

OK, Mr. Schlafly …

December 8, 2009 – 12:57 am

I guess I’m one of those terrible professors mentioned in the last post — after all I teach at Berkeley, that notoriously liberal institution, and I think there are serious problems with important conservative ideas about Bible translations, like how you translate ἄνθρωπος and ὕιοι. But let me tell you about what I did today. [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (23)

Thinking about Scripture

November 23, 2009 – 3:19 am

Last month I posted about trying to listen to Scourby reading the KJV , and how distracting it was working out what Elizabethan prose meant in expository texts (i.e., the epistles). This morning one of our readers took me to task. He argued that just because the KJV is hard to understand is not a [...]

Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (41)

Hi-tech meets the KJV

October 13, 2009 – 7:01 am

So I haven’t been too anxious to post while I’m in the middle of teaching a class about English Bible translation because I don’t want the students reading my reactions online. I’ll have things to say next semester. However, I got something for my birthday last month that has revolutionized my life — an iPhone. [...]

Posted in Bible Translation, KJV | Comments (20)
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