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Top Translation Traps: Forgetting Your Own Grammar
Mark 15:9 demonstrates how translation can make people forget their own grammar. A curiosity of English generally prevents anything from appearing between a verb an its object. This is why “I saw...
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Why the True Meaning isn’t the True Meaning
Last month, Bill Mounce, C. Michael Patton, and Clayboy all alluded to the issue of etymology, which is surely one of the biggest translation traps (and important enough that I devote considerable...
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Top Translation Traps: Relying on Structure
Perhaps the biggest translation mistake I’ve seen is relying too closely on word-internal structure to figure out what words mean. We saw this last week with toldot and in a comment regarding...
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Top Translation Traps: Myopic Translations
Sometimes it seems that translators look too closely at individual words, only asking “how do I say this ancient word in English?” rather than asking “how do I translate this text into English?” I...
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Top Translation Traps: Missing the Point
[Between six appearances in four cities and then having to buy a new car, I haven't been in front of a computer in nearly two weeks. So I'm playing catch-up, starting with a much-delayed installment of...
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Top Translation Traps: Dependence on the Dictionary
The Dictionary The dictionary can be double edged sword, used either to understand or wielded to confuse. In another forum, a KJVO proponent defended the KJV translation “the voice of the turtle” (for...
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Top Translation Traps: Too Much Information
Translators frequently have information at their disposal that doesn’t come directly from the text they are translating. Though it’s often tempting, it is nonetheless almost always a mistake to add the...
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Top Translation Traps: Slavery to Form
Zondervan has a chart (reproduced immediately below at right) suggesting that effectively conveying both the form and meaning of the original Biblical documents is the best way to reflect the original...
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Why Most Bible Translations are So Bad (And Why the Next Generation Should Care)
This past July I had the pleasure of presenting at a TEDx conference in East Hampton, the broad theme of which was “The Next Generation.” So I offered an 18-minute segment on Bible translation, on what...
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Modernity and Accuracy: Another False Dichotomy
Bible translation seems plagued by a few myths that won’t let go. One of them was recently repeated by Dr. Eugene Merrill in the Christian Post when he said that “if you want a more contemporary [...]...
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