Recently, I had the realization that anything translated to English is simply a way for me to understand what it says in the original language. This shower thought wasn’t challenging when I went to Montreal and learned the French word for ‘EXIT’ illuminated above the doors. The real impact of my epiphany was with longer translations, specifically the Bible.
God already condescended by providing the Bible in human terms (Romans 6:19); Is reading the Bible in English one further degree of separation from knowing the words of God?
No Bible translation from the originals (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) can be exact because of the occasions for figures of speech and the different rules of the original and target languages. Thus, there is a balance translators must weigh in their work:
Should the English translation interpret the original intent, for the sake of the target audience’s ears? One aspect of this necessitates they rearrange the original words to suit the rules of English. For example, in Spanish, agua azul is literally ‘water blue.’ But in translating, we’d put the adjective before the noun to make the sentence sound right.
Or should translators preserve the original language by publishing the literal translation and have the target audience sort through the grammatical confusion themselves? For example, in Judges 3, Ehud prepares to assassinate fat king Eglon. Word-for-word from Hebrew, Ehud steeled himself to attack saying, “Message secret I have for you, king.”
The first approach to translation seems safer. Because we’re dealing with the words of God, we wouldn’t want to miss his point by reading jumbled sentences. But maybe the second approach is safer for the same reason: we are dealing with the words of God and so should preserve them (as best we can) in their original form.
Translator Robert Alter argues for the latter in his book The Art of Bible Translation and provides examples of how approximating the original is superior to having a version of the Bible, as Alter caricatured it, “written the day before yesterday.”
Alter alerted me to the Ehud-Eglon example. Compare Ehud’s line above to how the Contemporary English Version of the Bible rewords it: “Your Majesty, I need to talk with you in private.”
Firstly, in the original, fronting his statement with “Message secret” shows Ehud’s priority on assassinating above addressing the king. Next, the CEV’s use of “private” dampens the adrenaline Ehud must have felt in preparing to kill King Eglon. Ehud’s urgency in the original also gives sense to Eglon’s greedy one-word response, “Silence,” which sent everyone but Ehud out of his presence.
Consider what else we miss by reading the Bible in modern English. In our non-agrarian culture, can we perceive all the intimations and implications David intended in Psalm 23, where he likens the LORD as his shepherd? And though not a Bible verse, might the alliteration in agua azul have served a purpose in context, something impossible to replicate in English?
I have heard that to read the Bible in its original language is to read it in color, whereas English is in black-and-white. Alter’s alterations to traditional translations never shook my faith. Rather, it showed me that while the English is sufficient for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3) studying up on approximations rooted in the original language enlivens the prose, the poetry, and the point.
– Scot Bellavia