MetaCatholic

A few days ago Jim West, never one knowingly to understate his case, said

There should be something shocking, something disconcerting, something unsettling about entering a foreign world, an alien environment. We should feel jolted when we read the Bible. It should make us uncomfortable. It should challenge our preconceptions about God, the world, and ourselves. And that is precisely and exactly where modern translations do their evil: instead of keeping us at a proper distance from the world of the Bible they pretend to take us back in time to the very desk of the author/editor.

(Love that “desk” Jim!) Today Rich Rhodes throws off the invisibility cloak he’s been wearing lately and shouts “Langlock” at Jim.¹

The argument of the piece is this:

The times of the Bible were very different from ours.
The Bible needs to express these differences.
Therefore the language of the Bible in translation should sound different.

I’m tempted to stop here and let the reader work out all the fallacies in that reasoning which should be perfectly obvious when it is laid out as a syllogism. But the fact that huge segments of the church have bought this bogus line for so long suggests I had better be more explicit.

This is getting to be a rather hackneyed debate, in which both sides are inclined to caricature one another, but I feel compelled to offer myself as the voice of sweet reason.

It seems to me reasonably clear that where the language of the Bible is simple, of low reading level, and clear, so should the translation be. And likewise, where it strives for an elevated and literary effect, so also should the translation strive. The problem with most translations is that they raise the valleys and raze the mountains in favour of giving God’s word a straight highway, however winding and convoluted a route it originally took.

I note that I deliberately chose a less than straightforward style for that paragraph. Communications often carry particular messages in their style and register that might not be found from a dictionary.

Jim, I think, rather misses the point that translation is about using all the resources of the target language to best express the full nuances of the source language. Where there was no alienation in that language, introducing alienation in the target language serves to add something to the communication. Equally Jim has a serious point that cultural references are to a different culture, and we must not call caves “bathrooms” as the Living Bible notoriously once did.

While Rich is right to say that translations must not wilfully obscure meaning for the sake of stressing the strange culture, I think he rather misses just how different the cultures can be. When he says: ” It’s about loyalty and honor, love and respect, and trusting God.” he overlooks the cultural embeddedness of these and other concepts, and the ways in which self and other are conceived. We do not typically hear the connections between glory and reputation, nor conceive our honour so much through other people’s eyes. Here a translation can mislead, because it can easily elide some very different ways of thinking.

Rich’s example is perhaps more interesting than he makes it. He takes a quotation from the story of the sheep and the goats, and suggests that the HCSB, is good precisely because it makes the meaning plain.

But he replied, ‘I assure you: I do not know you!’ (Matt 25:12)

However, I beg leave to doubt that. First, I wonder whether “assure” is remotely the right verb to introduce one of the most condemnatory clauses in scripture. It seems to me to fail at a fairly basic level of meaning. Secondly, and more importantly, this is a passage where Matthew (in common with the whole Jesus tradition) has already made a significant translation choice, which is not to translate. Beginning solemn utterances with “Amen” is seen as so characteristic of Jesus (and possibly unique to him) that the Hebrew is preserved in the Greek translation. Its regular use in prayer that has persisted to this day means that we, just as much as the original audiences, would hear just how distinctive and unusual it was for Jesus to use our prayer-finishing word as his declaration-starting word. Alone among our English translations, the NAB gets this right.

There are lots of individual decisions to be made, but there is no overarching principle of either simplicity or alienation that dictates all of them from the start.

1. A useful little spell to glue someone’s tongue to the roof of their mouth – see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [↩]