A Doctrine of Translation

Stop lying about me. I have made no claim that "you need a special gift to be able to assess which translation choices are best." My claim is that God gifts translators.

 

This is a lie. I never said, thought, or wrote this.

 

Tell you what, folks, I'm going to have to put Van on "Ignore" again so I can ignore his lies and continue to post.

 

I'm going to copy and paste one more of my lecture outlines on the OP, hoping to get this thread back on track.

The Bible Translator’s Favorite Verse
Nehemiah 8:8

“So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”


INTRODUCTION: Evidently many of these Jews, newly returned from Babylon, had let their Hebrew language skills lapse, speaking only the Babylonian dialect of Aramaic. Therefore, they needed someone to interpret the Word of God for them. Speaking from personal experience as a missionary for many years, it is not hard to lose some of the language of your homeland, especially if you do not return for years. A generation gap is even more destructive.
How should a Bible translator be thinking about the source and target texts? This verse informs us. We should be concentrating on the exegesis of the original before producing a text in the target language. This means the translator must pay attention to hermeneutics. “As a theological discipline hermeneutics is the science of the correct interpretation of the Bible. It is a special application of the general science of linguistics and meaning. It seeks to formulate those particular rules which pertain to the special factors connected with the Bible.”[1]


I. “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly”

1. The original ought to be read distinctly.
   1. A good knowledge of the original language is required. This requires much study.
   2. The Apostle Paul wanted his Bible (2 Tim. 4:13), obviously for study.
2. This was an oral culture. Perhaps few of the listeners could read themselves, so how the Bible was read became very important.
3. How great it would be if all believers knew the Bible well and could quote large portions of it. However, it is much more important to have it in our hearts (Ps. 119:11). Understanding what we read is far more important than just reading the Bible. Remember the example of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-39, esp. 30).

II. “And gave the sense”

1. The sense of the original is to be given in the hearer's (or reader's) language.
2. Notice that the meaning in the original language has priority over the meaning in the target language.
3. That is, the original language document is always authoritative. This is standard among secular translators, so it is against basic linguistic principles to insist that a translation of the Bible is more authoritative than the original text.
4. The Bible was given in the original languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek (2 Tim. 3:16-17). This means that the Bible in those original languages is always authoritative over any translation.
5. Textual criticism is a different matter entirely, and should not color our thinking on which is more authoritative, the original or the translation. For example, the argument that no one has ever seen the Greek or Hebrew autographs is bogus, because no one has ever seen the original hand-written manuscripts of the King James Version either!
6. “If translation is regarded as an extension of communication, any changes (or lack of changes) to the source text could only be justified by a feeble pragmatic excuse such as ‘this is how it is usually done,’ which is no justification at all.”[2]
7. Chinese translation scholar Jin Di broke with Eugene Nida on this very issue, writing, “The idea [of dynamic equivalence] is that things hard for the target-language readers to comprehend may be replaced with something familiar to them in their own culture. In fact, this is exactly Dr. Nida’s view which I have taken exception to in the aftermath of our cooperation in 1982. I will not repeat what I think I Have made clear in some of my essays, except that the issue arose over Dr. Nida’s support for replacing ‘a holy kiss’ with ‘a hearty handshake’…in the New Testament.”[3]

1. The Apostle Paul knew this, and the importance of the original, and used the original in his teaching, clearly indicating by his exegesis of an Old Testament passage that the original had priority over the LXX translation (Gal. 3:16).

III. “And caused them to understand the reading”

1. This is the final goal of the translator.

1. The translator wants new believers to understand the Bible, the precious Word of God (1 Peter 2:1-3). The Bible is absolutely necessary for discipleship (Matt. 28:18-20).
2. The translator wants believers to grow through understanding the Bible (Heb. 5:12-14).
3. The translator wants lost people to understand the Bible and get saved (Rom. 10:17).

​

1. It was important for the hearers (or readers) to understand. A translation that is not understood is of little use. “Of Luther’s comments on his translation, the most widely known are those articulating his desire to make his translation German, generally comprehensible German: ‘to produce clear language, comprehensible to everyone, with an undistorted sense and meaning.’”[4]

CONCLUSION: Understanding and correctly interpreting the original documents of the Bible is vital for the translator. You cannot translate what you do not understand. Modern translators are every bit as responsible to follow Nehemiah 8:8 as the original priests were to do so.

[1] Bernard Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation (Boston: W. A. Wilde Co., 1956), 11.
[2] Katharina Reis and Hans J. Vermeer, trans. by Christiane Nord, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 1984, 2013), 77.
[3] Jin Di and Eugene Nida, On Translation—An Expanded Edition (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 1982, 2006), 273-274.
[4] Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 48.

 

How is this different? In other words, if God gave someone the ability to interpret Japanese, why is that not the same as the miracle of Acts 2? In other words, the miracle of Acts 2 was the giving of a language (without anyone going to language school!) miraculously. In your scenario, the language is given miraculously to one individual, who is then able to interpret. But that's not the gift of interpretation, is the gift of the Japanese language, which then enables one to interpret.

So, in other words, you are putting an unnecessary step into the process. Why would God not simply give that gift of Japanese to the whole group? What would be the purpose of giving it to just one person so that person could interpret? And what would he interpret? A Japanese sermon so that the English speakers could get saved?

So, in Acts 2 the gift was for the particular goal of telling people about Jesus, of proclaiming the Gospel in the various languages. If the gift had been interpretation instead of languages, there would have been an extra step in the process. "We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God" (v. 11).

 

It is interesting that this verse uses all three of the NT words for miracle: "signs" (Greek semeion), "wonders" (teras), and "miracles" (dunamis, "powers"). Then, only after that, are gifts of the Holy Spirit mentioned. In other words, there are many gifts of the Holy Spirit that are providential, not miraculous. In other words, the Holy Spirit gives many gifts through DNA, rather than through miracles. I believe that God has gifted me in the area of translation by my DNA, rather than by some miracle. I believe that many of the gifts of 1 Cor. 12 and Rom. 12 are simply God's providence, not miraculous, working in such a way that His purposes are done through gifted individuals.