Why Is Biblical Translation So Controversial?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I have noticed a general trend in the philosophy of Bible translation within the last century.

In Finland, we have a widely used Finnish translation that is called the ‘church bible’. The latest version was translated by a committee that represented the main denominations in Finland. The ‘church bible’ has been ‘upgraded’ a couple of times to help the readers to understand the language and to include the recent findings of research. The translations are from the years 1992, 1933/38, 1776 and 1642. There is an even older translation from the year 1548 but that was translated by one man.

Some people felt that the 1992 translation was ‘too dynamic’ and included translations that were not faithful to what the biblical scriptures were teaching. They made a translation called ‘the bible for the people’. It updated the language but otherwise tried to be more faithful to what is written in the biblical scriptures - a ‘semi-literal’ translation.
There are also several translations that try to be as understandable as possible.

There is still a small group of believers who think that the version from the year 1778 (a corrected version of the 1776 translation) is the trusted Bible that we should use. Most believers use either the ‘Bible for the people’ or the 1992 version of the ‘church bible’.

We made an exercise where we compared the different translations of chapters in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) with the Greek text. Surprisingly, the Finnish translation that was the most faithful to the original texts (Nestle-Aland texts) was the church bible from the year 1933/38. All translations published after the year 1990 strived to be understandable, to the point that they deviated from the original text whenever understandability seemed to demand it. All translations published during the last decade were quite different from the original text although they were translated directly from the Greek texts - easy to read but did not translate what was written in the Greek texts.

My interpretation about this observation is that there had happened a switch from Bible-centered to reader-centered focus.
A century ago, what the biblical scriptures told directed the life of believing Christians and an exact translation supported that goal.
Nowadays, the focus seems to be in the reader and translations try to ensure that the readers understand the message (as we understand it).

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Who is in the bubble is debatable. I’d say Evangelical Bible scholars teaching at Evangelical institutions that limit their academic freedom in certain ways and only platform old white Reformed guys who speak English as experts are the ones living in the bubble. I on the other hand participate in conferences and forums and professional development and read extensive input from and work collaboratively in the global community of Bible translation professionals across a wide spectrum of Christian faith traditions. My “bubble” is a whole ecosystem whereas theirs is more of a ghetto.

No, because according to best practices, trained local speakers need to be doing the contextualizing and translating, not foreign missionaries. Also, it’s just a bad translation and doesn’t represent the communicative intent of the source text and treats the receptor language speakers in a patronizing way. A lot has changed in minority language Bible translation since the 60s.

Once again, the whole “essentially literal” and “dynamic equivalent” distinction was invented by American Bible publishers to sell Bibles. It’s not a real criteria used in actual Bible translation. Global BT usese the criteria “clear, accurate, natural, acceptable” (and there is a push to include “beautiful” now) and those criteria are always in tension and can be used to evaluate both “foreignizing” translations (ones that sacrifice naturalness and clarity to prioritize accuracy and acceptability) and “domesticating” translations (ones that sacrifice accuracy to prioritize naturalness, clarity, and acceptability.) “Acceptability” is relative and defined by a receptor culture. Some audiences want texts that are harder to understand but “closer” to the original texts/cultures. Some audiences want texts that most clearly communicate meaning.

We are never objectively “translating a text,” we are always translating the message. All translation is communicating meaning, otherwise it is just a gloss and it won’t make sense to people who don’t have an existing knowledge base in the original language and culture.

Right, because all translations have target audiences who contribute their views to the “acceptability” criteria. It’s a big part of the sausage-making. No translation is objective and “agenda-free.” Making them more “literal” is not the answer, because churches/cults have never had a problem twisting ambiguous or unclear Scripture to fit their interpretations. Translations don’t disciple people into the meaning of the text, Christians do.

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A pastor I worked with advised people to have two Bibles, one for study and one for just reading. Another who was briefly a mentor said to learn as many languages as possible and read the Bible in all those languages (sadly I can’t read in much more than English these days; my French and German are long lost and my Spanish is fading; Latin is gone, too, and for Hebrew these days I need a lexicon handy) – interestingly, he taught himself Finnish by getting a Greek/Finnish parallel New Testament and worked through it!

My first Greek professor distinguished between translating words, translating clauses, translating paragraphs, and translating entire works, with each new level requiring adjustment to the previous ones. So many people seem to regard translation as just the first or perhaps the first two! In fact he pointed out places in Greek literature where a writer seemingly deliberately set up sentences or paragraphs so that the apparent meaning suddenly shifted as a statement concluded.

That’s what bugs me about Adam’s appeal to the idea that translators “get it right” so he doesn’t need any input from the original languages.

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@Daniel_Fisher @St.Roymond

This idea of objective translations reminded me of this passage from a manuscript I was just working on. (It was a conference paper on Bible translation models that is being published as a book chapter.)

My co-author wrote the following about the verse under discussion:

For example, the introduction to the New Living Translation (NLT) repeatedly emphasizes the goal to produce a text that is clear and understandable for today’s readers, but also mentions that it was produced by a “diverse group of Evangelicals” (NLT2004:A10), leading to at least the possibility that the clear and understandable message is one that aligns with evangelical doctrine.

One aspect of the overt mission was that they “clarified difficult metaphors… to aid in the reader’s understanding”, as seen in Gen 15:1, “I will protect you”, rather than the more literal “I am your shield” (ESV). Gen 15:6, however, perhaps reveals the more covert mission: “And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith” (NLT2004). The final clause “because of his faith” renders a pronoun in Hebrew, literally, “he-credited-it to-him righteousness”. Is it possible that the NLT translators have explicitly chosen the word “faith” rather than a pronoun, or a word like “belief” that would be more appropriate in the context, in order to align with evangelical emphases on Paul’s use of this verse in Romans?

The New Century Version (NCV) is even more explicit about the mission agenda that underpins the translation, with its preface emphasizing the editors theological commitments that “the Bible is God’s message and that it is ultimately addressed to all people in every age” (Kohlenberger 2003, cited in Marlowe, n.d.). Their translation of Gen 15:6 shows an even clearer connection to later Christian (and specifically Protestant) interpretations: “Abram believed the Lord. And the Lord accepted Abram’s faith, and that faith made him right with God.”

By contrast, the Common English Bible (CEB) has some similar goals, aiming for a translation “accessible to a broad range of people”, and with an explicitly Christian missiological purpose “designed to meet the needs of Christians as they work to build a strong and meaningful relationship with God through Jesus Christ” (CEB, “Explore”). However, the inclusion of 24 different faith traditions, including Roman Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists and Reform Judaism (CEB, “Study Sampler”:4) may be the reason for a very different translation of verse 6: “Abram trusted the Lord, and the Lord recognized Abram’s high moral character.”

So the idea that there is broad consensus on the best “objective” interpretation/translation is wrong. It’s an ambiguous verse. It would be a novel choice to read the object of righteousness credit as God not Abraham and most translation commitees aren’t going to go with novel choices because of tradition. But it’s also true that translation committees sometimes “fix” the text or fill in information they believe to be implicit (a very subjective exercise) to obscure tensions between the Old and New Testament, which is a little sus and definitely agenda-driven. At the end of the day, you aren’t going to be able to prove one way or another which intepretation was intended with grammar alone, you are going to need to appeal to the whole cognitive context in which the utterance took place. Which is why Michael’s reading isn’t necessarily a bad one, because it fits nicely with the context of covenental faithfulness which is so essential to understanding so much of the theological framework of the Old Testament and probably Paul too. Reading Reformed justification by faith alone back into the Old Testament often leads you to wrong interpretations of the intended meaning, even if it gets you nice harmony and “Scripture interpreting Scripture” which Evangelicalis like so much.

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Nearly everyone is going to get more meaning out of several good translations than the original texts, including people who can read Greek and Hebrew. They texts are so well-studied, so I actually agree with Adam that trusting the translation committees is a good posture. But it’s also good to read in multiple versions so you can see which verses come out really different from version to version. That clues you in to where there is amibiguity or textual variants or debate or words/ideas we struggle to translate. Reading the original isn’t going to resolve the tension, it’s just going to help you see what the tension comes from. There are things we just can’t be sure of at all, so you have to embrace the gray areas and not build entire doctrines on a handful of contested verses.

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That’s something else that is a beef of mine, the idea that translators aren’t influenced by what readers will accept.

It’s especially troublesome when many of the NT verses – that say “faith in Christ” – on which that approach relies are of dubious rendition in the first place (e.g. in many, maybe most, of Paul’s letters the phrase is literally “faith (or faithfulness) of Christ”, where “in” is more of an interpretation).

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I think you’re preaching to the wrong choir member…. I already agree with this….

I was using the word “objective” to describe what it sounded to me like @mtp1032 was claiming about the LXX, in that he seemed to believe it was objectively erroneous because it did not follow what he believes to be the “objectively” correct way of understanding the MT of Gen15:6… I.e. explicitly identifying Abram as the one reckoning righteousness to God.

Objective is my word, but I was using it to describe what I understood to be someone else’s approach.

I may be mistaken, and erroneous in wrongly attributing that description to Michael’s perspective, but my observation for right or wrong was that, as I understood him, that @mtp1032 was claiming that there was one objectively right interpretation of the MT here, and that the LXX was objectively wrong for failing to follow that particular interpretation.

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I wasn’t trying to argue with you, I was just trying to further the conversation. I thought you might think the quotes were interesting.

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Genitives are notoriously difficult to interpret and translate. They are often totally ambiguous.

On the tradition rules the day note, I just finished an article on English translation and language change and Reformed interpretive tradition and Isaiah 64:6, if you are interested. Pretty crazy stuff.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389484860_Fertility_Futility_and_Filth_Ancient_and_Modern_Conceptual_Blends_and_the_Menstruation_Imagery_of_Isaiah_646

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One class once sat in a sort of befuddled awe once when two professors argued over a genitive, the issue being whether it was actually an ablative, as the Greek genitive absorbed the ablative somewhere between classical and Koine. The befuddled part was because the genitive could be taken that way anyway, the awe that they actually went on for almost twenty minutes disputing before they realized they were sort of wasting our class time.
(Though a few in the class showed which ‘feeder’ school they’d come from in that they had no clue what an ablative was – that school’s program was more than a little deficient.)

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Wow. :scream_cat:

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You are a pro in Bible translation and I respect that. As I wrote, I do value (and support) translation projects that try to give all tribes a possibility to read the biblical scriptures with their own language. I am not a pro, so I use ‘wrong’ terms but please bear with me, even when I do not use ‘accepted’ jargon.

We all live in some sort of bubble, you and me both. We look at things from our viewpoint, which is not the same as being objective. Your viewpoint (bubble) is the ‘ecosystem’ of modern bible translation community. My bubble is more the end users of Bible translations in a context with ‘old’ Christianity, and also somewhat within biology that is a semi-hard science. And by the way, my ‘pro’ jargon makes me a bit uncomfortable when someone speaks about the ‘ecosystem’ in another meaning than the biological definition…

In the bubble of conservative end users of Bible translations, the issues that pop up may differ from those that are the focus of the Bible translators. Many conservative believers in my surroundings are very Bible-centered and try to be fully obedient to what is written in the NT. That would be fine if they could read Greek and Hebrew, and understand the basics of interpretation. Many cannot, so they take a translation they trust and take the text literarily as is written in the translation. Typically, these people have not studied theology, so their understanding about theology and interpretation of biblical scriptures can be quite shallow. When there is a time to make decisions, they take the translation literarily, stick to it and support decisions that seem to be faithful to the translated text. This has popped up in many questions, for example in how a woman is allowed to serve in the church.

In this kind of context, it may be helpful if the translation is ‘faithful’ to the original text in the sense that the translation does not only translate the supposed (interpreted) message, it tries also to translate the original text as closely as is practically possible. That gives a better possibility to discuss with these people about what is the actual message in the original text.

I have noticed that trained pastors tend to use the most common and understandable Bible translation because they can read and understand the original texts. In sermons, they read the understandable translation and where they feel it is needed, they explain what the Greek/Hebrew text actually tells. In that way, they can give both an understandable and accurate teaching that is acceptable even for the most conservative Bible-centered listeners.

The problem with this approach is just that the person teaching needs to be able to understand Greek and/or Hebrew and the basics of exegesis fairly well. If there are not such persons available, the translation gets more authority than the translators may have realized.

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no the academic claim is that he did his best work whilst he was married!

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door opener for the kjv only community…they feed off this kind of statement.

Also you made mention of not much has changed since the 60’s. My question to you is why would that be the case?

I still come back to something i have said earlier…why are people here seeking a “single translation”. That is madness, i never take any of my theology and doctrines from a single translation…your statement about biases highlights one of the main reasons why!

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I largely agree with your observations, though I think it’s important to keep pointing out they mostly describe American/Canadian English speakers, and the situation is different, even among conservative, traditional, Bible-centered listeners in other cultures with different prestige version Bible translations and different histories of language use and different dominant Christian denominations. There are far more factors that influence what people expect from the Bible and how people engage with the biblical text than “literal vs meaning-based” translation, and I’d argue that most of the factors are social and communal and encultured and have very little to do with one individual’s approach to reading/hearing the Bible. Swapping out their version for a more literal or more meaning-based one isn’t going to fundamentally change their doctrines because people don’t get doctrines from reading the Bible, they get them from teachers who disciple them into what the Bible means. Hopefully those teachers are personally interacting with them in their local church, but they might be on the radio or internet or in books or in the notes in a study Bible. I think it matters far less than people assume how “faithful” the preferred translation is to the specific textual choices of the source texts. What matters is the community people are looking to in order to have the significance of the text explained to them and to teach them what the Bible is, what it does and doesn’t do, and how to use it profitably to live life. You aren’t going to get “women can be pastors” or “racism is wrong” or “science is good” from any Bible translation, you are going to get that from the people discipling you and the way they are applying what the Bible says to different questions than the original audience was asking.

When it comes to “taking the Bible literally” we are talking about an approach to interpreting and applying any translation. (Rendering the source text more or less “literally” is a separate issue than what people do with the rendering they are given.) That “I take the Bible literally” approach is learned in church, it doesn’t come from the translation. Giving people a less “literal” translation of the Bible won’t change their overall approach to the Bible, they need to be taught how to read the Bible (in whatever kind of translation) with different goals and strategies.

Describing reality isn’t going to affect reality. In Mexico where I work, minority language translations often have to use the same source text as the prestige Spanish version Reina-Valera (same source text as the KJV) to be acceptable. That’s just living in reality, it’s not agreeing the RV60 people are right.

I actually said the opposite. A lot has changed since the 60s when white missionaries went to remote monolingual people groups, learned their language, and translated the Bible for them, often in very paraphrastic ways that made the text say what it doesn’t actually say in order to be “understandable” to people who did not have local words or concepts for many of the key terms the Bible uses.

That’s not happening anymore for a whole host of reasons. We are sensitive now to colonization and cultural imperialism and racist/white supremacist ways of interacting with non-Western minority groups. We know that missionaries will never speak or understand a language like a native speaker. Translation theory and communication theory have developed and linguistic models are different. We use cognitive linguistics and functional grammar models and do discourse analysis and apply Relevance Theory and Optimality Theory, not Chomsky’s generative grammar. Multilingualism and cultural contact and public education/basic literacy is far more widespread and there are very few truly monolingual and culturally isolated communities in the world. The center of global Christianity and missions sending effors has shifted to the Global South as the West has moved into post-Christendom. (The past two CEOs of my org, SIL Global have been African and most of the executive leadership team is not North American.) It is far easier to create recordings and work in oral instead of written forms for drafting and checking. It is far easier to create multi-modal Bibles (audio and visual at the same time), so widespread community literacy is less important for Scripture access and distribution. Publishing and distribution strategies have completely changed as internet and smart phone access has expanded. We have sophisticated software to work with different scripts and fonts and use tools for research and consistency and checking and local translators have increasingly sophisticated computer skills and higher levels of formal education. Since just recently we are able to create pretty impressive AI drafts to change completed Scripture to a related dialect. We now know that the idea that the Bible itself preaches the gospel is misguided. Churches preach the gospel and disciple people into the Chrisitan faith, so the focus is now on church-based initiatives. There is far greater attention to diaspora communities now when access to the place speakers come from is limited or Christians are persecuted. So all in all, it’s not the same landscape at all.

Yes, it’s definitely better to read multiple versions or even multiple languages if you can. But please remember that this is a privilege and most of the people in the world only have one translation in the language they understand best and almost half of the languages of the world have no translation at all. There are 756 languages that have complete Bibles. There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Of those, only slightly more than half (around 3700) have at least some portions of the Bible translated. English-speakers are pretty unique in having so many versions of the Bible to consult.

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But he was married multiple times and appears to have had a few lady friends on the side. So if you wish, it was he did his best work while young AND married as he didn’t do anything meaningful when he was old AND married.

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One point to remember is that one country imports much of the TV programs, videos and literature that circulate in the world. Because of this influence, USA-style interpretations have become quite common around the globe. Not in distant villages or among minority tribes but in cities where some people understand English and make translations. For example, YEC-type interpretations are largely imported teaching that originates from USA, either directly or through translated texts.

In practice, this means that the ‘made in USA’ problems have become global problems.

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This fits with what came to mind as I read again the thread title: translation is hard, or anyone who has taken two years of Koine Greek could qualify to translate the New Testament!

Heh – that’s what got me started in Greek: hearing ten different preachers say, “What the Greek means is . . . .” gave a dozen different results.
Turns out that most preachers that have taken some Greek have gotten just enough to be able to find their way around a lexicon competently, and have a very poor understanding of how translation works. Many, in fact, only took Greek because it was required and never use it except to look things up.

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