Our “Sophisticated” Bible Translators

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"The greatest poets draw near to ordinary people. A savage’s song may be savage, but it is not dull.

It takes real sophistication to attain the depths of dullness. Our translators have that sophistication."

I suppose that we cannot lay the entire blame on translators. Universities after all seldom teach or appreciate poetry either in language or in life.

It’s a short essay but worth the read:

 
In the 1968 NAB rendering of Luke 1:28, we get the infamously bad 'highly favored daughter"
 
My undergraduate work was in Classics (Latin, Greek, ancient literature, history, and culture). My wife has to put up with my complaints about the aethetics of a translation, poem, or song lyric regularly.

I actually do not mind the NABRE when taken as a whole. There are many places where it is quite felicitous. (The wording “highly favored daughter”, while not in the NABRE, is rhythmically quite nice: híghly fávor’d dáughter.)

Do I think there are more sonorous translations? Of course. But there are also many, many more that are far worse.

The NABRE serves adequately, and in my personal reckoning, is perhaps in the top 5 American translations made since the 70s on aesthetics alone.
 
Here are some excerpts from an example given in the article:

Consider the strange Hebrew verb in Genesis:
“And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.” That is in the eminent King James Version.

So how does the NAB translate this powerful verb? It smothers it, obscuring the connections among the passages I have alluded to:

“The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived, and gave birth to Cain, saying, ‘I have produced a male child with the help of the Lord.’”

Dreary. A technical verbal phrase, “had intercourse with,” replaces the verb. The earthy “gotten” is gone too, replaced with the pallid “produced.” Eve’s triumphant cry, “I have gotten a man,” echoing Adam, “She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man,” is reduced to a comment about a male child – when child is not in the Hebrew at all. And “from the Lord,” direct, potent? Reduced to “with the help of the Lord.” What was God doing, boiling water for the delivery?
 
I agree with the author to an extent, but I think it’s important to highlight something that he otherwise glosses over: Scripture translators are bound to objectives other than aesthetics.

Most - if not all - translations are intended for multiple purposes: personal reading, lay group study, academic study, missions, liturgy, etc. To a great degree, many of these are mutually exclusive: a translation that is accessibly accurate for lay group study is unlikely to have sufficient ‘gravitas’ for liturgy. It is that triad between accuracy (often literalness), clarity (of sense) and aesthetics.

Translators must constantly rejig their prioritisation between those three values, which tend to conflict with one another. A further issue is that one verse of translation considered accurate, clear and poetic often becomes outdated fairly rapidly in the 21st century due to the great change of pace in vernacular English.

In this respect, the author of the article is being somewhat unkind to the translators, as the author himself translates literature (mostly secular), and he does so as an individual, not as part of a large assembly of scholars bound by a charter and whose translations are subject to an editorial board for review.

Like @MiserereMei, I studied Classics in my undergraduate (but I focussed exclusively on Attic Greek and Latin as languages) with further study in Koine and Hellenistic Greek and Classical Hebrew. One of my professors was involved in the translation of the NRSV, and he often imparted insights into the manifold complexity and negotiation required for Bible translating the Bible.
 
The endless modern butchery of scripture needs to stop. It is destroying faith, particularly in more protestant countries where the written word is so fundamental. It is most true the scripture is so much richer than any translation could hope to capture, but deconstructionism and radical skepticism plus some extremely unsavoury anti-Christian (and ridiculously unfounded, at least historically) “translations” pop up.

I think a lot of people come to Christ by daring to give the bible a chance. That’s a start. But if you butcher a bible too much it becomes impossibly difficult to find a consistency or any substance in it (the words become so mangled you can’t recognize the development of ideas in progressive revelation). It’s tough enough even in good translations.
 
It is the Apostles who teach us [not the Bible, as if we were Protestants finding for ourselves in ‘the Word alone’].

The Bible is not unlike the Catechism in providing a roadmap of inspiration (for teaching us) to the Apostles (our Bishops and their mouths, their Priests, whom they ordain to speak face to face with us the correct opening of the Scriptures to us (so we are not tossed around by self-interpretation but have the Scriptures opened to us by Jesus speaking in his official messengers)).

There are many translations and interpretations, but only One who knows what to teach us.

The 2 on the Emmaus road were discouraged - they knew the Scriptures!!!
Or did they? If they could not see that this man walking with them was Jesus, they certainly were not seeing Scripture correctly on their own. But they needed Him to open the Writings to them, explaining…

Translators are not Apostles / Bishops. They just provide a framework for the living face to face instructions you seek from your LORD.

John Martin
 
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MiserereMei said:
The NABRE serves adequately, and in my personal reckoning, is perhaps in the top 5 American translations made since the 70s on aesthetics alone.
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I agree. And while there are many other better translations out there, I adamantly maintain that the NABRE is far superior to the NIV or NLT (two of the most popular contemporary Protestant Bible translations).
 
Bithynian said:
‘gravitas’ for liturgy
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I read this is what the KJV translators chose: they were thinking of pulpit preaching that would impress itself on the audience (and make the entire bible “impressive,” at least for the English). So it is absolutely excellent for the judgments of prophets (THUS SAITH THE LORD(!)), but for the poetic or more human (as in humanities) aspects, it is completely obliterated.

I think most people want a bible you can word study. Extremely difficult because of nuances and connotations peculiar to every language. But it would be nice if, for example, “annointed one(s)” was instead translated ‘christ(s)’ or at least Christ (in the NT) was translated ‘anointed one.’ Bible scholars know what I mean.
 
Below the article is the little c in a circle which warns us that this essay is copyrighted. Therein lies the problem with modern translations of the Bible – they cannot plagiarize from other copyrighted materials, so the translators have to use their thesauruses and imagination to come up with a non-offending way of translating the verse.

If I’m not mistaken, Royal is an attorney and should know better – my apology if I have misrepresented that as fact when it is not so. Nevertheless he has deftly avoided the obvious problem of copyright infringement which produces – to him and perhaps to us all – watered down translations.

This problem stacks itself on top of the ordinary challenge of making a translation, in the first place, because, as he points out, something is lost in translation.

I think the 4th edition of the NAB is pretty good, but I have multiple translations for reference when I want to know more. NSRV-2CE, Jewish Study Bible - the TANAHK – (for most of the Jewish scriptures), even some biased Protestant translations.

I have even invested in the commentaries from the Jewish Publication Society which focus a lot on just such key words like “knew” but I have not found the perfect commentary yet. I use a Strong’s concordance, too, recognizing its protestant bias – but it helps.

(this is a broad subject to discuss. I forgot what I was going to say Oh – there is seemingly an endless list of new books that are published even just by Catholic authors which are constantly adding insights to the meaning of scripture. When I read the scriptures, I sometimes have to wait years until I get the real meaning of something, which is why I have veered into commentaries – but we should stay in the scriptures themselves, for sure Then, too, you have to keep an open mind.

For example, why did John the baptist say he was unworthy even to untie the strap of Jesus’s sandal?
I heard a talk by a priest who elucidated that remark by reference to Ruth chap 4 – Jesus is the Bridegroom.

There are prohibitions in the Old and New Testaments about “eating” blood – but Jesus says we must eat his body and drink hiis blood. Scripture alone does not explicitly explain this seeming contradiction. There is no hint to this dilemma in the OT, but the hint comes, I think, in Jesus’s words about the new covenant. Figure it out?.)
 
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Human sacrifice and cannibalism was all too common in the ancient world. I would think Saint Justin Martyr (pray for us) might have said, based on what I have read of his writings, that demons instituted these practices amongst the gentiles in profane mockery of what was said by God’s holy prophets. The Greeks themselves thought the Flood happened vaguely because of human sacrifices and cannibalism, if memory serves correctly. The Sumerians said it happened (I kid not) because human beings were making too much noise (in context, the implication is that people were actually praying to them too much! But it reminds me of that verse in Genesis that talks about when people started to ‘call upon the name of the LORD,’ as if in distress.)

Our Catholic doctrine of original sin makes banning cannibalism (or drinking human blood or eating human flesh) sensible enough, I think. For a sacrifice to be pure its victim needs to be pure, spotless, without blemish, etc. For an actual substitute for sins the victim must be able to recompense the infinite majesty of God. So even, I’d think, a sinless human being (e.g. the blessed Virgin) could not actually atone for mankind’s sins. Only God could do that.
 
Ugh! The blogger exhibits a great deal of pride… and his own writing is nothing to boast about.

He couldn’t even say one good thing about the New American Bible or its translators. I’ll file his article under non-love. (Correct me if he did say anything in their favor. I might have missed it.)
 
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Beryllos said:
He couldn’t even say one good thing about the New American Bible or its translators.
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To be fair, I should say something good about him or his blog article…

Whew! That’s a tough assignment…

Okay, I’ve got it! The artwork in his article aptly illustrates his attitude.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Well done, sir!
 
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The sophisticated/ ordinary person contrast in this article is a very old distinction that has come under many names. Anglosaxon/Latin is probably the most important version of it for this article. All of ordinary person words have germanic roots; the “sophisticated” words all have Latin roots. The conflict goes back to William the Conqueror at least, and is manifest in stories of Robin Hood and the like.

I say all this because, in the 1990s, the Vatican reshaped its rules for liturgical translations. In an effort to defend Latin, the new rules placed an emphasis on using vernacular forms that come from Latin. This decision was probably made by Italian, French and Spanish speakers, where latin forms are used by ordinary persons, or by Poles and Germans whose languages are not as full of Latinisms as English. Most knew English, but were not paricularly sensitive to this aspect of it. They did not realize they were calling for “sophisticated” language rather than “ordinary” language.

Complaints like this article are inevitable. They will contribute to more revision and retranslation until the rules change again.
 
I will tell you, that on a daily basis I translate Bible verses from French into English, and to just find the right way to translate something, is hard, because a lot of words have multiple meanings, in many languages. An example in English, to my American ears, his Worship the Lord mayor, sounds really wrong.
 
Likely, translations are influenced by numbers and types of readers. If, for example, the U.S. population reads on average on the eighth-grade level, then a translation suitable for that population will follow that level.

The reading level for NABRE is around the ninth grade.
 
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