If what I’ve been reading on English-language media is accurate (I can’t really read Danish, so it makes it difficult to check things first-hand), it seems that the Danish translation team substituted words with free-wheeling interpretations of what they could mean for us today, in a Bible which is apparently aimed at the general public.
The Bible Society in Israel gives a few examples here, which I do find difficult to defend from the strict point of view of faithfulness to the text.
Here is how the Danish Bible Society justifies its translation choice :
I personally find the whole “People today do not know that Israel means something else than the modern state” line a bit weak. Explaining such things is what prefaces, introductions and footnotes are for.
my understanding is that the word άμαρτία, normally translated as sin, is being translated as mistake in this version.
I couldn’t really check this (although the DBS link above hints at it), but to be fair, it’s one of the meanings of the word in (classical) Greek. It shares a common root with the verb ἁμαρτάνω, which originally meant “to miss the target” or “to lose one’s way”.
Now, I agree that making that choice, rather than “error” or “sin”, among the possible translations of the word, shows an ideological bias I don’t like either. As far as I know, it was indeed used as the word for “sin”, in the religious sense, in Koine Greek.
That said, poor translations abound, in all languages. Bible versions such as teenager-aimed translations, “easy language” or “contemporary” versions often have a niche audience or fall out of favour after a while – particularly if their vocabulary choices or ideological choices date them.
