How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions - Softcover

Fee, Gordon D.; Strauss, Mark L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310278767 ISBN 13: 9780310278764

Verlag: Study Resources, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

With so many Bible translations available today, how can you find those that will be most useful to you? What is the difference between a translation that calls itself “literal” and one that is more “meaning-based”? And what difference does it make for you as a reader of God’s Word? How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth brings clarity and insight to the current debate over translations and translation theories. Written by two seasoned Bible translators, here is an authoritative guide through the maze of translations issues, written in language that everyday Bible readers can understand. Learn the truth about both the word-for-word and meaning-for-meaning translations approaches. Find out what goes into the whole process of translation, and what makes a translation accurate and reliable. Discover the strengths and potential weaknesses of different contemporary English Bible versions. In the midst of the present confusion over translations, this authoritative book speaks with an objective, fair-minded, and reassuring voice to help pastors, everyday Bible readers, and students make wise, well-informed choices about which Bible translations they can depend on and which will best meet their needs.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Gordon D. Fee† (PhD, University of Southern California) was professor emeritus of New Testament Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Mark L. Strauss (PhD, Aberdeen) is university professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary, where he has served since 1993. His books include Four Portraits, One Jesus; How to Read the Bible in Changing Times; The Essential Bible Companion; and commentaries on Mark and Luke. He also serves as vice chair of the Committee on Bible Translation for the New International Version translation.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth

A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible VersionsBy Gordon D. Fee Mark L. Strauss

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2007 Gordon D. Fee and Mark L. Strauss
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-27876-4

Contents

Abbreviations of English Bible Versions...............................................12Preface...............................................................................13Part 1: The Task of Translation1. The Need for Translation...........................................................192. The Meaning and Task of Translation................................................25Part 2: Making Words Work3. Translating Words..................................................................454. Translating Figurative Language: Idioms, Metaphors, and Poetry.....................615. The Greek Genitive: A Problem of Its Own...........................................77Part 3: Translation and Culture6. Cultural Issues in Translation.....................................................877. Gender and Translation.............................................................97Part 4: Other Translation Issues: Text and Presentation8. The Question of the Original Text..................................................1119. Issues of Style and Format.........................................................119Part 5: The Bible in English10. A Brief History of the Bible in English...........................................13511. Contemporary Bible Versions.......................................................145Glossary..............................................................................159Notes.................................................................................163Index.................................................................................165

Chapter One

The Need for Translation

Many years ago a much-admired teacher of Greek stood before her first-year Greek class. With uncharacteristic vigor, she held up her Greek New Testament and said forcefully, "This is the New Testament; everything else is a translation." While that statement itself needs some qualification (see chap. 8 below), the fact that it is still remembered fifty-plus years later by a student in that class says something about the impact that moment had in his own understanding of the Bible. For the first time, and as yet without the tools to do much about it, he was confronted both with the significance of the Greek New Testament and with the need for a careful rendering of the Greek into truly equivalent-and meaningful-English. And at that point in time he hadn't even attended his first Hebrew (or Aramaic) class! Since the majority of people who read this book will not know the biblical languages, our aim is to help readers of the Bible to understand the why, the what, and the how of translating the Bible into English. It will be clear in the pages that follow (esp. chap. 2) that we think the best of all worlds is to be found in a translation that aims to be accurate regarding meaning, while using language that is normal English. Nonetheless, our goal is not to tell the reader which translation to use; in the end, that is a matter of personal choice. And while we think that everyone should have a primary translation of choice, we hope also, in light of the richness of available options, to encourage the frequent use of more than one translation as an enriching form of Bible study.

The Why of Bible Translation

The question of "why biblical translation" seems so self-evident that one might legitimately ask "why talk about why?" The first answer, of course, is the theological one. Along with the large number of believers who consider themselves evangelicals, the authors of this book share the conviction that the Bible is God's Word-his message to human beings. So why a book about translating Scripture into English? Precisely because we believe so strongly that Scripture is God's Word.

But we also believe that God in his grace has given us his Word in very real historical contexts, and in none of those contexts was English the language of divine communication. After all, when Scripture was first given, English did not yet exist as a language. The divine Word rather came to us primarily in two ancient languages-Hebrew (with some Aramaic) and Greek, primarily "Koine" Greek. The latter was not a grandiose language of the elite, but "common" Greek, the language of everyday life in the first-century Roman world.

Although modern Hebrew and Greek are descendants of these languages, the reality is that the languages spoken in ancient Israel and in the first Christian century are not the same languages spoken today. For contemporary Israelis and Greeks, reading the Bible in their original languages is like our reading the English of its early writers, such as the fourteenth-century Chaucer. We recognize many of the words, but many we do not, and the grammar is especially strange to our ears.

The third answer to "why do we need biblical translation" lies with a reality that might seem obvious to all, but which is often misunderstood. This is the reality that languages really do differ from one another-even cognate languages (i.e., "related" languages such as Spanish and Italian, or German and Dutch). The task of translation is to transfer the meaning of words and sentences from one language (the original or source language = the language of the text being translated) into meaningful words and sentences of a second language (known as the receptor or target language), which in our case is English. At issue ultimately is the need to be faithful to both languages-that is, to reproduce faithfully the meaning of the original text, but to do so with language that is comprehensible, clear, and natural.

As we will see, this means that a simple "word-for-word" transfer from one language to the other is inadequate. If someone were to translate the French phrase petit djeuner into "word-for-word" English, they would say "little lunch"; but the phrase actually means "breakfast." Similarly, a pomme de terre in French is not an "apple of earth," as a literal translation would suggest, but a "potato." Since no one would think of translating word-for-word in these cases, neither should they imagine that one can simply put English words above the Hebrew words in the Old Testament or the Greek words in the New, and have anything that is meaningful in the receptor language. After all, the majority of words do not have "meaning" on their own, but only in the context of other words.

One might try in this case, as one of the authors has done regularly in introductory classes, to present the word "bear" to a group of students and ask them what it "means." In response one gets a large number of "meanings" for the word (large furry animal, to give birth, to carry, to endure, to put up with, etc.), but never the meaning that was actually in the mind of the professor. For he and his family were from the American west coast and were now living in New England. They had asked a service station attendant for directions to a high school gym in a neighboring town so they could watch their son play basketball. "Go down this (winding) street," we were told, "and when you come to the tree, bear right." Although context gave us a fairly good idea of what was intended by the word,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Study Resources
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0310278767
• ISBN 13: 9780310278764
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland