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Translation



      Doug de Lacey wrote:

>But how can I know I have understood?  What were the cadences of
>the idiom (if that's what it was :-) "the son of man" (whether in
>Ezekiel, in Daniel, or in any of the Gospels)? If Prof JC O'Neill
>is right, Paul uses "in Christ" not as a formula or idiom but in
>a variety of different and quite unrelated ways: "through"; "by means
>of", "because of"; "in the case of"  &c. But again, how can we know?
>It is precisely because Larry's reader will "form serious judgements
>about meaning, application, teachings, intention, etc." that I'm
>worried. I guess I'd rather see a programme of educating the readers
>of the dangers of *any* translation than presenting them with another
>one which they may think they can rely on with impunity. I certainly
WHile I appreciate the point I think Duug is trying to make, his append
makes me ask the question, "then what's the use of trying to translate,
since the translator cannot be sure of an approximately valid result and
the odds of getting readers to all learn Greek, though desirable
is pretty remote?"  Sooner or later, if one wants to provide a translation
of the Bible or any other work into a target language, you do have to,
at some point, say "After studying the possibilities, this is what I think
is correct" and print it, being open, I would hope, to corrections as
that might seem appropriate later.  Otherwise, you basically end up
saying that since you as a translator cannot be "sure" of the meaning,
you give up, don't translate, and leave the source language document
completely inaccessible in the target language.  I don't think
that's what Doug would suggest, but he has set up a scenario in which
that seems to me to be the only real course left to me, short of
qualifying every single word that I translate with all the alternate
possibilities, which would make a translation virtually unusable.
A translation may not be perfect, but surely we can be approximately close
enough for it to be usable in communicating the basic gist of the
original author(s) can't we?


Ken Litwak
IBM, San Jose, CA