Hearts and minds

September 28, 2012 – 2:57 pm

Mark 6:45-52 is the familiar story of Jesus walking on the water, which comes right after the story of the feeding of the five thousand. The narrator in v. 52 concludes that the disciples might have understood how Jesus could walk on the water if they had been able to really understand that he was able to feed the five thousand. In the Authorized Version, verse 52 reads, “For they considered not [the miracle] of the loaves: for their heart was hardened.” Is that a good translation? Well, we all know the language of the KJV is archaic, so let’s look at the RSV: “For they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.” Okay, we know that the RSV is a faithfully literal translation, so we can be assured that the original really does say here something about hearts and about hardness. (A look at the wording of the Greek original confirms that fact.) That must be a good translation, right? Because it reflects what the original says. The NIV (both the 1984  and 2011 versions) says, “For they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.” Looking also at the New Living Translation, we see “For they still didn’t understand the significance of the miracle of the loaves. Their hearts were too hard to take it in.”

So, what does that mean? My understanding of the expression “hard-hearted” is that it means that someone is callous toward other people’s feelings. Huh? Is this saying that the disciples were insensitive to Jesus’ feelings? Or was it someone else, to whom their insensitivity was directed? To confirm my understanding of the expression, I looked it up, and according to the Random House Dictionary, hard-hearted means unfeeling, unmerciful, pitiless, heartless, merciless, mean, unforgiving, from Middle English hard herted. This means that the disciples couldn’t accept what was going on because they were pitiless, mean, and insensitive. Right?

Compare this with a set of other English Bible translations that do not use the word “heart” in Mark 6:52. Is it possible that these could be correct, accurate, even if they are missing a word that is in the original?

TEV: “because they had not understood the real meaning of the feeding of the five thousand; their minds could not grasp it.”

CEV: “Their minds were closed, and they could not understand the true meaning of the loaves of bread.”

GW: “They didn’t understand what had happened with the loaves of bread. Instead, their minds were closed.”

JB: “because they had not seen what the miracle of the loaves meant; their minds were closed.”

Here is what one commentary says about this expression: “This hardness of heart is something quite different from our use of the same words, denoting blunted feelings and moral sensiblities. The Biblical καρδία denotes the general inner man, and here especially the mind, which is represented as so calloused as to be incapable of receiving mental impressions.” If this commenary is right, and I believe it is, based on my own studies, then it is possible that a translation that translates καρδία into English as “mind(s)” is more accurate than a translation of “heart(s)” in this context. Or maybe an analogous idiom like “thick-headed” would be appropriate. Along those lines, we translated this verse into Saint Lucian French Creole (1999) as “paski yo p’òkò té konpwann miwak-la Jézi té fè èk sé pen-an. Tèt yo té wèd toujou.” (I’ll leave it to you to figure out that one.)

The problem, of course, is that in different cultures, different qualities are attributed to different body parts. That’s a simple way of putting it. The translation problem is cultural and linguistic. In this case, it might not be so bad if the resulting translation resulted in no meaning, such that the reader/listener might realize that a proper understanding is lacking and go looking for it. But what is worse here is that a literal translation involving “hardness of heart” would prompt a wrong interpretation without the reader/listener being aware of it. This may be debatable, but I believe that a translation cannot be accurate if does not prompt, or at least allow, a proper interpretation in the mind/heart of the reader.

Now let me back up and qualify that a little. There are different kinds of translations. There are what I consider normal, good translations, suitable for lectionary or devotional purposes or personal reading, and then there are special purpose translations, such as quite literal ones. A literal translation has a purpose of giving a word-for-word rendering, and if this results in an incomplete or inaccurate understanding, that is not their problem. The RSV falls into this category, and I appreciate the RSV a great deal. It is very dependable for certain purposes. I use it for study purposes, to get at the forms of the underlying original texts. But it is a special purpose kind of translation that I would use for study but not for general use. So I am not criticizing the RSV, considering its special purpose, and when it first came out, it was one of the few Bibles available that did not use the archaic language of the King James. What I am saying is that a normal translation is not so tied to the words of the original that it does not take responsibility for accuracy of understanding on the part of the reader, and that accuracy in a translation is tied to an accurate understanding on the part of the reader/hearer. Of course, no translation is perfect.

By David Frank | Posted in Bible Translation, biblical idioms, Biblish, Greek, idiom, metaphor, natural English, semantics, translation accuracy, translation equivalence | Comments (59)

doves or pigeons?

September 24, 2012 – 3:51 am

A commenter from The Wuggy Chronicles just asked in our Share section:

I have been wondering why in many translations, “peristera” is translated as “dove” in John 1:32, but rendered “pigeon” in 2:14,16. An important layer of poetry is lost by using a different word there, so I’m curious about what tradeoffs motivated that (pretty common) decision.

I enjoy answering this kind of question since it involves looking at a number of different English Bible versions which I like doing.

First, I can’t speak to tradeoffs that motivated the decision not to use the same bird name in the two passages in John. I seldom have any idea what motivates a translation team to translate as they have unless they explicitly say what their motivation is. I agree with you: I see no reason to use a different bird name in the two passages. I believe that the versions that use the same English bird name to translate the same Greek New Testament bird name are clearer for English readers that the same bird is referred to.

Now, to the first part of your comment, the versions I have viewed which use the words “dove” and “pigeons” in the two passages are RSV, ESV (essentially the RSV with doctrinal revisions of a few verses), REB, GNT, and GW.  I cannot think of anything these versions have in common that are different from other versions.

Versions which use “dove” and “doves” are: KJV, Douay-Rheims, NASB, NWT, NKJV, NIV, NRSV, CEV, NJB, NAB, NLT, NCV, TM, NET, HCSB, ISV, and CEB.

By my count, the score is 4 versions (5 if ESV is counted as a different version from RSV) that use “dove” and “pigeons” and 17 versions which use “dove” and “doves.”

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (13)

theopneustos or theo pneustos?

August 7, 2012 – 9:40 pm

A BBB visitor has asked:

Question: didn’t early Greek manuscripts eschew spaces between words?

Yes, that Greek was written without spaces between words.

How do we know that 2 Timothy 3:16 says “pasa graphe theopneustos” instead of “pasa graphe theo pneustos”? That last one would make the English translation something like “God inflates every writing”.

It’s interesting to think of alternate meanings for the biblical text if the word breaks were different. But in each case the alternate must be possible according to Greek grammar. In this case the alternate is not possible because it is ungrammatical in Greek. The word for ‘God’ would need to be in the nominative case which is spelled “theos”. There is no Greek word spelled just as “theo”, even though there are some Internet webpages which erroneously state that “theopneustos” is made up of two words, “theo” meaning ‘God’ and “pneustos” meaning ‘breathed.’ What these webpages are trying to say is that “theo-” can appear as part (a bound morpheme) of a compound word. (This is another warning not to believe everything claimed on the Internet. We have to check out our sources to see if they are reliable, credible.)

“Pneustos” would be a word but it would not mean ‘inflated’ but, rather, ‘breathed.’

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (2)

Hebrews 2:6 – A Response to Rick Shields

July 21, 2012 – 10:48 pm

I have been working for a couple of weeks on a response to John Hobbins’ response to my previous post. There I will talk about  differences in usage between, Xenophon, the LXX, and the NT to argue that the NT is not ALL in Biblish. But then Rick Shields posted on Hebrews 2:6 which touches on a key issue and my comment to him was turning into a whole post, so I’m responding to Rick here, and postpone the trickier discussion of John’s points till later.

We linguists wince at the treatments of the gender “problem” in Bible translation, because it’s one of the key places in which people argue from a complete misunderstanding of the nature of language. Grammatical gender is simply not referential, it is classificatory.

The belief that grammatical gender is referential, in turn, triggers a theological feedback loop, in which people fight tooth and nail for interpretations that simply aren’t warranted by the text, as if their salvation depended on it. But that’s another matter.

At least three dimensions are in play in translation, Bible or otherwise. One is the referential intent of the writer. Another is the norms of usage in the respective languages, and the third is the intertextuality within the larger conversation that the particular text was written as part of.

I tried to tease out the second of these dimensions, the usage one, in my post a couple of weeks ago. But it didn’t work very well, because it got overrun by a discussion that was driven by questions of intertextuality. Then Rick Shields posted on a topic that goes to the heart of intertextuality, and I couldn’t resist.

In garden variety translation, including literary translation, the priorities are (in order):

1) Get the reference right.
2) Make the usage natural.
3) Then work in whatever intertextuality you can without damaging the previous two priorities.

There are, of course, complications. Sometimes the “real” reference is implied in some way, rather than stated, and you may have to wiggle some to get it to come out. For example, you may have to undo a metaphor that doesn’t work in the target language. Knowing just when to do that kind of thing is what makes translation an art form.

But in Bible translation, usage somehow seems always to end up at the bottom of the priority list. And for some people, intertextuality is at the very top. That is, they are willing to sacrifice even clarity of reference to maintain the intertextuality of the original.

While I personally don’t agree with devaluing usage, I understand that it is easy for us to accept the distortions of weird usage because we’ve heard so much Scripture in some or other distortion of Elizabethan/Jacobian English, that we think natural usage just isn’t what Scripture should sound like.

I could go on for days about that.

But overvaluing intertextuality is a real problem for me. And Rick Shields has landed smack dab in the middle of one of the most difficult cases. (He posts about it here. He says he’s talking about gender, but that’s not the real problem with the passage he cites.)

Let me set up the case.

The OT uses the trope man (אֱנ֥וֹשׁ  enosh)/son of man (בֶן־אָ֝דָ֗ם ben-adam) in repetitions/elaborations for emphatic reasons. There are many examples. I’ll cite just one.

Blessed is the one (אֱנ֥וֹשׁ  enosh) who does these things
and the person (בֶן־אָ֝דָ֗ם ben-adam) who holds on to them.
Blessed is the one who keeps the day of worship from becoming unholy
and his hands from doing anything wrong. (Is. 56:2) (GW)

This is the device being used in Ps. 8:4.

what is man (אֱנ֥וֹשׁ  enosh) that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man (בֶן־אָ֝דָ֗ם ben-adam ‘son of man’) that you care for him? (Ps. 8:4) (ESV)

Now here’s the problem.

Jesus frequently uses the very non-Greek phrase υἰὸς ἀνθρώπου (= בֶן־אָ֝דָ֗ם ben-adam, ‘son of man’) to refer to himself.  He follows in the OT tradition of Ezekiel in what one could and probably should interpret as a claim to be a prophet. It’s probably something that you don’t even try to translate, you just calque it. (And that’s OK, because it’s as weird in Greek as it is in English, and the writers of the NT simply calqued it from the Aramaic, rather than making the pragmatic substitution.)

But in the end Jesus turns that phrase into a reference to Daniel 7:13 and a claim to being the Messiah, (Matt 24:30, 26:64, Mark 13:26, 14:62, and Luke 21:27). The writer of Hebrews knows this, so he’s reading the Messianic claim back into Psalm 8, and the translator is forced to give the intertextuality high priority here, just to maintain the intended reference.

The result is a minimum requirement that the form of the two noun phrases in question must be both singular and indefinite. That traps you in awkward English, since we prefer our generic references to be plural or definite.

Sheep are docile animals.
The sheep is a docile animal.

are both more natural than

A sheep is a docile animal.

An attempt to preserve the singular definite might read like this:

what is the mortal that you pay any attention to him,
or the son of mortals that you care about him?

That doesn’t quite work. But I have another kind of solution.

I have long argued that OT quotes in the NT are in Biblish Koine as opposed to the rest of the NT Koine. If you take that position then the OT quotes should generally be set off in KJV-like language.

Here’s a larger excerpt from Hebrews 2, using existing translations to show the kind of approach, I favor.

4 God himself showed that his message was true by working all kinds of powerful miracles and wonders. He also gave his Holy Spirit to anyone he chose to. 5 We know that God did not put the future world under the power of angels. 6 Somewhere in the Scriptures someone says to God,

“What is man, that Thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man, that Thou carest for him?
7 For a little while Thou madest him lower than the angels;
Thou crownedst him with glory and honor,
and didst set him over the works of thy hands:
8 Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.

God has put everything under our power and has not left anything out of our power. But we still don’t see it all under our power. 9 What we do see is Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels. Because of God’s wonderful kindness, Jesus died for everyone. And now that Jesus has suffered and died, he is crowned with glory and honor!  (vss 4-6a, 8b-9 CEV, vss 6b-8a ESV/KJV mash up)

By Rich Rhodes | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (21)

Gender in translation

July 21, 2012 – 5:06 pm

Seminary president Rich Shields revisits the issue of translation of gender in English Bible versions. He discusses  how gender is translated in Genesis 1:26-27, Psalm 8:4 and Hebrews 2:6 in four versions: NIV2011, ESV,  HCSB, and GW.

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (1)

Four Translations–Readability

July 16, 2012 – 5:01 pm

Rich Shields has just blogged about testing readability in four English Bible versions:

NIV2011

ESV

HCSB

GW

Rich invites our feedback to his test.

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Leave a Comment

latest Christian bookstore Bible sales

June 30, 2012 – 6:11 pm

Here are the latest figures for Bible sales in Christian bookstores. These figures do not include sales at amazon.com and other general book sales bookstores.

Bible sales chart

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (12)

Norms and accuracy

June 23, 2012 – 4:34 pm

I’ve been absent for quite a while here. I’m on sabbatical and trying to finish not one, but two, books. Since I last posted I’ve been to India on a spur of the moment trip.

One of my wife’s work colleagues got married and invited us to the wedding. So we went. I have for years been telling my wife that I wanted to visit India some day. Seeing the Taj Mahal was on my bucket list. So she called my bluff.

Anyway, we also got to visit some longtime friends in Tamil Nadu as well. Mary met them in Ethiopa in the 60′s. They are a family of polyglots. They speak excellent English in addition to their native Tamil. From their years in Ethiopia, they speak Amharic. Their son, who has had a most interesting work history, went back to Africa to work so he speaks Swahili as well as Hindi and all the major Dravidian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, and Telegu). This is an example of something we linguists say over and over. Much of the world is multilingual. People who speak only one language are the exception, not the rule. And Vinod didn’t learn his languages by studying them in school for years. Rather he picked them up mostly in the context of living and working in places where he needed to have them. Needless to say, he thinks about language and translation in a very different way from you and me. To him language is the tool you use to communicate with.

That’s a position I’ve been arguing for in this blog for years.

If you think it’s the words of the original that are important and that wording must be preserved up to the limits of intelligibility, then you have to be willing to distort the meaning because no two languages work the same way — even if they are closely related.

Let’s look at a subtle example where Koine and English match in categorial distinctions but the where the norms of usage are different, and see what the distortion of meaning is.

The words in question are man, woman, and person on the English side and ἀνήρ, γυνή, and ἄνθρωπος on the Koine side. The categories match.

man = [adult male human]
ἀνήρ = [adult male human]

woman = [adult female human]
γυνή = [adult female human]

person = [human being]
ἄνθρωπος = [human being]

The difference I want to focus on is a subtle one.

In English one normally includes the gender of the referent unless there is reason not to. As a result man is about four times as frequent as person in running text, and woman is about three times as frequent.

But in Koine, it’s the other way around. You don’t use the gender based term unless there’s a reason to.  So ἄνθρωπος is a little more than twice as common as ἀνήρ, and in one in eight of those cases, ἀνήρ means ‘husband’, not ‘man’. The patterns are similar for woman.  Ἄνθρωπος is a more than four times as common as γυνή, and in half of the cases, γυνή means ‘wife’, not ‘woman’.

If you saw a man standing on the corner and you say (1), it is not just a simple report. You imply something more.

(1)  I saw a person standing on the corner.

Because (2) is what we normally say, unless there’s a reason to withhold the gender of the referent.

(2)  I saw a man standing on the corner.

For that reason alone, translations that try to push the gender neutrality of  ἄνθρωπος often sound odd in English. Here are some examples.

καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ ἄνθρωπός εἰμι ὑπὸ ἐξουσίαν, … (Matt. 8:9a)
The Source: I, too, am a person under authority, …
Stylistically better: I, too, am a man under authority, …

Ἄνθρωπός τις ἦν πλούσιος ὃς εἶχεν οἰκονόμον, καὶ οὗτος διεβλήθη αὐτῷ ὡς διασκορπίζων τὰ ὑπάρχοντα αὐτοῦ. (Luke 16:1)
The Source: There was a certain rich person whose manager was accused of wasting money.
Stylistically better: There was a certain rich man whose manager was accused of wasting money.

Δεῦτε ἴδετε ἄνθρωπον ὃς εἶπέ μοι πάντα ὅσα ἐποίησα· … (John 4:29)
The Source: Come see a person who told me everything I ever did!
Stylistically better: Come see a man who told me everything I ever did!

In these cases ἄνθρωπος is best translated man. That choice isn’t driven by sexism, but by the norms of English usage.

But then that knife cuts two ways.

There are places where translations in the King James line say man (for ἄνθρωπος) where person, someone, or human or some kind of indefinite is a more accurate translation, both referentially and stylistically.

τί γὰρ ὠφελεῖται ἄνθρωπος κερδήσας τὸν κόσμον ὅλον ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἀπολέσας ἢ ζημιωθείς; (Lk 9:25)
ESV:For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?
Stylistically better: What will you gain, if you own the whole world but ruin yourself or waste your life?

Of course, we’ve heard enough sermons now to know what Matt. 15:9 means, but apart from Biblish (or in fixed phrases) we don’t use a nominal construction with man when we mean to highlight humanness.

Human nature does not mean the same as the nature of man.

This is especially when we want to highlight the distinction between human and divine.

To err is of man, to forgive is of God.

So

8 Ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῖς χείλεσίν με τιμᾷ,
ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ·
9 μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με,
διδάσκοντες διδασκαλίας ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων. (Matt. 15:8-9)
ESV: 8 “‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
9 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
Stylistically better: “‘These people honor me with their words,
but their hearts are far from me;
9 their worship is useless,
they teach human commandments as doctrine.’”

None of our translations even begin to grapple with questions of style beyond the frequently cited argument that Biblish sounds like better English. (A point I roundly dispute.)

But, I fear, that by pointing out the stylistic problems associated with the use of gendered terms, I may have stepped into a mine field.

So let me affirm that I’m saying there are specific passages (and not a few of them) where using man makes for better English than using person or human (being). In asserting that I’m responding to stylistic concerns, not pushing an anti-feminist or complementarian agenda. I’m certainly not a feminist, but I am egalitarian. So if I say there are places where ἄνθρωπος is better glossed man, it’s not because I have a theological ax to grind.

(WARNING: If the comments start to wander off into a debate, theological or otherwise, about men’s and women’s roles, I’ll moderate with a heavy hand.)

By Rich Rhodes | Posted in Bible Translation, gender, natural English, translation accuracy | Comments (8)

How much does God want to help us?

June 17, 2012 – 7:26 pm
By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (11)

Does the Lord keep you?

June 13, 2012 – 4:09 pm

Numbers 6:24 is the beginning of one of the most beautiful benedictions in the Bible. Ministers often recite these verses as a blessing upon their congregations. The words have been set to music and I love to hear them sung.

But I don’t know what one of the most important words in this benediction means. It is the word “keep”. I know what “keep” means ordinarily, but not how it is used in Numbers 6:24, with minor variations worded as:

The Lord bless you and keep you (KJV, ASV, D-R, Lexham, NASB, NIV, NKJV, ESV, NCV, TM, CEB)

I do understand the following translations of Number 6:24:

May the Lord bless you and take care of you (GNT)

I pray that the Lord will bless and protect you (CEV)

May the Lord bless you and take good care of you.  (NIRV)

May the LORD bless you and guard you (REB)

The Lord will bless you and watch over you. (GW)

The LORD bless you and protect you (NET)

May the Lord bless you and protect you. (NLT)

May Yahweh bless you and protect you (HCSB)

May the LORD bless you and guard you. (ISV)

Now, because I have heard the traditional words of Numbers 6:24 all my life, I have assumed that I understood them. But when I have stopped to think about the words, I realize that “keep” doesn’t sound right to me as it is used in this verse. How about you?

By Wayne Leman | Posted in Bible Translation | Comments (40)
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