Category: Translation Theory

Near the end of our time in seminary, when we had first decided to pursue Bible translation, I remember having a conversation in class about translating a Greek word. The Greek word was a familial term that referred to a group of Christians of both genders. Some translations translate this word into English as “brothers,” others as “brothers and sisters,” still others as “brethren.” In class, I argued that since there was an English word that had the same meaning as the Greek, we should just translate it as “brethren.” At the time, I had spent 4 years getting a…

This will be my last post on translation theory for a while. Generally speaking, there are four qualities that we strive after for a good translation: accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and acceptability. So far, I have already talked about accuracy and clarity. For this post I will discuss naturalness and acceptability. Naturalness One of the targets of translation is that the translation would be natural in the receptor language. This is perhaps one of the simplest targets and also one that is the most difficult to achieve. My experience has been that if you hand a bilingual person a text and…

I have tried in the last few posts to explain some of the characteristics of a good translation. To build up to accuracy, I also discussed the meaning of words, explication, and audience. Another of the characteristics of a good translation is known as clarity. Clarity is a value in Bible translation, in part, because historically Protestants have believed that the Scriptures are understandable. The Reformers referred to the issue not as clarity, but as perspicuity (a word we don’t usually use now because…it’s not easy to understand). The word perspicuity means “the quality of being clear and easy to…

This is the fourth blog post responding to the recent post by my friend Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? Here are links to those posts with some important takeaways: This leads me to my definition of accuracy: A translation is accurate when the original message is communicated to a new audience. No meaning should be added, removed, or changed in the translation. If I understood his position well, I think Aaron would identify my definition with communicative accuracy, something that he believes is more akin to clarity. On the website I just linked to, you will…

This is the third part of a series on translation responding to a recent post by Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? It probably would be helpful to read the other two posts first: On Meaning and On Audience, but here are some major takeaways from those two posts: With this background in mind, I would like to discuss something that Aaron mentions in his post, which is what translators call “explication.” Explicit and Implicit Information In order to understand explication you have to first understand that in human communication, we always say less than we mean….

In my last post (On Meaning) I began the build up to responding to a post by my friend Aaron Shryock regarding accuracy in Bible translation. In that post I made a claim that “while meaning in the source text can be discovered apart from the audience, meaning in the receptor language is very audience-dependant.” For context, when translating we take a source text (in our case, the Bible) and translate that text into a receptor language (Kwakum). In this post, I want to explain how meaning can be audience-dependant. Meaning in the Source Text is not Audience-Dependant First, I…

I recently read a post by a friend of mine, Aaron Shyrock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation?. I want to address some of the concerns that Aaron brought up in regards to accuracy, but I felt that it was first necessary to discuss the meaning of “meaning.” A while ago I wrote a blog that made the claim that all Translation is Meaning-Based. Check out that post if you want to see what I mean by that. As far as I know, Aaron would not disagree with this idea. When we translate (the Bible or anything else) we…

Stacey and I have chosen to live in a village here in Cameroon and work directly with a single people group: the Kwakum. The longer we are here, the more we are thankful we have chosen this method. Just the other day my neighbor Patrice told me that several people in the same village died at the same time. I asked what happened and he told me that there was mbɔsɔ cyɛti, which they would translate into French as mauvais médicament ‘bad medicine’. I asked some follow-up questions, because I wanted to better understand what happened. I asked if it was tromadol, a…

In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. – Luke 10:21 As John Piper points out in his article What Makes Jesus Rejoice, the verse above is only one of two places where Jesus is described as rejoicing. The reason for his joy was because when the seventy-two disciples returned from their preaching tour, they told him that the Gospel message was…

We always knew that Bible translation was a life’s work and that fruit from it would likely not be enjoyed for many years. We have contented ourselves in the fact that ensuring that the Word of God was translated faithfully and understandably was worth the time investment. Some things are too sacred to be rushed. Further, we know that not one of God’s elect will be lost. However, since we have been in the States, three of our friends in our village have died. We know that in the 20-ish years that it’ll take to translate the Word of God,…