b-greek digest: September 02, 1999

Jonathan Robie jwrobie at mindspring.com
Fri Sep 3 20:23:39 EDT 1999


I rather liked this little article on the trade-offs and difficulties of 
Bible translation:

http://www.christianity.net/ct/7TC/7TC076.html

Incidentally, you may find that for those who are not rather well educated, 
many of the issues of Bible translation are very abstract and difficult to 
grasp. For many people who do not know a foreign language, it seems that a 
literal translation should be a matter of simply moving the words from one 
language to another, without changing them or interpreting them.

It can be helpful to let them try to translate English into English - to 
convey what a phrase means without using the same words - and to see that 
two translations can come out a little differently even within English. 
Even then, some people seem to feel that the only reason it is difficult to 
do this is that the original already used the obvious English words and 
didn't leave them with the right vocabulary to say it right.

Jonathan
--
Jonathan Robie
R&D Fellow, Software AG
jonathan.robie at sagus.com



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