Years ago when I was in high school, my friends and I were very interested in understanding the Bible. We wanted to read the most correct translation available but it seemed like all of them added words to the English version. I remember my friend Herb asking in frustration, “Why don’t they just translate the Bible literally into English so we can read the original?” One problem with Herb’s question is that he assumed that the Greek language was merely English encoded. In his mind all one needed to do was to find the English words that corresponded to the Greek words to translate a sentence. Yet anyone who picks up an ‘inter-linear’ version will see immediately that a word for word translation results in broken English at best.
The job of translators is not merely to
decode the words but to give the sense of meaning that they were intended to
give. To do that they must make two fundamental decisions: The first is to
decide what the Greek actually meant to say and the second is to decide how to
say that in English. The reason that there are so many translations is because
there are so many possible results from these two choices.
In this article I will save the discussion
about the meaning of the text for the scholars and skip to the decision
translators have to make on how to phrase the meanings they arrived at. Should
they translate it informally into everyday language by adding modern English
idioms or try to keep the word order and phrasing of the original even if that
results in an awkward-sounding translation? Maybe the right answer is to aim
for somewhere in the middle. You can see that there is a kind of continuum
between two poles. The ‘formal equivalent’ versions (like the NASB and ESV ) attempt to recreate
not only the original words but the structure of the sentences while the
‘functional equivalent’ translations (like the NLT and the NCV) seek to convey
the meaning of the text in a way that modern readers could understand though
the idioms and phrasing of the original are not always kept. I will describe
these poles below.
Functional
Equivalent Versions
Fee and Strauss in their book How to
Choose a Translation for All Its Worth try to explain the philosophy of
functional equivalent versions by using a Spanish phrase.[1]
The phrase “como
Formal
Equivalent
Assuming everything I said so far is
accurate, it seems like a slam dunk for the functional translations. Yet there
are some good reasons to include a formal translation on your study table. One benefit
of formal equivalents is that they show us places in the text where a
translational decision needs to be made. In other words, they point out
instances where the passage could be translated in several different ways.
The NASB tells us in Eph 2:3b
that we were, “by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” This strange
phrase tends to make us stop and wonder about its nuances. Clearly we must
reject the translation ‘angry children’ and prefer something like ‘children who
deserved the wrath of God because they were sinful.’ The NLT gives, “By our
very nature we were subject to God’s anger” but this seems to put the onus on
God being angry rather than on our own sinfulness. The NLT may or may not be
right in its decision, but it makes that decision for us. Also, functional
translations like this make difficult passages easy to read quickly. As a
result we tend not to pause and contemplate their meanings.
For years I assumed that the translations
that were harder to read were the better ones, kind of like how medicine must
be good for you if it is terrible to taste. But now I don’t think that is
necessarily true. The best translation for you depends on what you want to get
out of it. Your best bet is to use a variety of them when you do a study of
scripture. I can only hope Herb would have been satisfied with that answer.
By Jason Gayoway
Published in the Daily Herald Tribune September 3, 2015
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