How a Translator Chooses Words

After I get the files back from my up and coming scholar in America, they go off to the Tokyo team, missionary linguist Brother D. and his Japanese friend T San. I've never met T San, but Brother D is an old and dear friend, and an excellent Japanese linguist. He has even worked on renewing his college Greek for the translation work, and helps me in that area occasionally.

Now, here's an interesting story. Brother D never graduated from language school. Let me give some background. In about 1982 I was traveling on the Yamanote train line ("Hand of the Mountain") in downtown Tokyo, returning home from language school. I overheard a discussion by two other gaijin ("outsiders," foreigners) who went to the rival language school, which had an excellent curriculum designed for missionaries (mine was a secular school). Unfortunately, the teacher with the most seniority in that missionary language school was as lost as a goose, as they say, an unrepentant non-Christian.

One language student said to the other, "I don't know your theology, but I believe in a literal, eternal Hell. I hate to admit it, but I'm so fed up with that lady that I don't pray for her salvation anymore!" Strong words!

With that in mind, we go to the same language school several years earlier when Brother D was a student. (We are the same age, but he arrived in Japan before I did.) The teacher ordered him to say in Japanese, "I like beer." D refused! They never could get him to say "I like beer" (among other things, D is hardheaded--in a good way!), so when he finished the course they refused to give him his diploma!

Years later, when they were about to go bankrupt, the language school contacted D. and offered him his diploma, but he turned it down. It was too little too late. In spite of having an excellent curriculum, their attitude and practices did them in and the school went bankrupt. Unforutunately, they forgot that their students were really customers who could recommend the school to other missionaries.

 

Back to my subject. Bro D and T San do quite a bit of revising on the work Uncle Miya and I do. That’s a help to me. It forces me to think through what we’ve done, making sure our semantics are on target. I don’t take all of their suggestions by any means, but I carefully think through each of their renderings and compare what we have done so far. Bro T helps in this by including in his file of the verse his rendering, T San’s rendering, and a final editing of the two. So for example if I think Bro D’s rendering sounds too foreign, I can compare it to T San’s rendering and get a sense of what a Japanese thinks of it.

Here’s an example of their input on Romans 1:26—

You can see the concern for the reader here. While I do not follow Eugene Nida’s “reader response theory” (that the 21st century reader of a translation should have the same response as a 1st century reader of the original), yet still it is vital that we produce a translation that is easily understandable by the average reader.

I value the knowledge of Japanese semantics both of these men bring to the project. I cannot count how many mistakes they’ve corrected. If only I were somehow enabled to be perfect in my Japanese! But that of course is impossible. Some of you old timers on the BB may remember a thread I did with tongue pretty firmly in check, asking for help on how I could produce a perfect translation. Funny, no one had an answer for me!

 

The final editor is Pastor T, a Japanese pastor up here in Hokkaido who I’ve known for decades. In fact, I taught him Greek and other subjects in Bible school down in Tokyo about 20 years ago. Pastor T was a missionary to Brazil for about ten years before having to come back to Japan to take care of his elderly and ailing parents. God worked it out so that he could pastor in the same town as the group home his parents were in!

When Pastor T returned from Brazil several years ago with his wife and son, I showed him hard copy of the second draft of the book of Romans, and he was excited. He asked if he could take it with him and look it over, and I readily agreed, since he is fluent in Japanese, English and Portuguese, and has studied Greek under me. He copied off the entire book, wrote corrections in the margins and gave it back. I was thrilled, and “hired” him immediately for the project.

One area Pastor T has helped in is how to translate “I” and “me” when Jesus is speaking. Sound simple, doesn’t it? It isn’t simple in Japanese by any means due to the keigo respect language. My problem was that other Japanese translations do not use the Chinese character [FONT= ]私[/FONT], which would be the normal way, but instead use the hiragana syllabary to spell it out as [FONT= ]わたし[/FONT]. Now this mystified me, since there is a second way to read the character, [FONT= ]わたくし[/FONT]. Why distinguish the word in this way? I asked various Japanese about this, but never got a satisfactory answer until I asked Pastor T. His solution was that if they had used the Chinese character, it might be read by some as [FONT= ]わたくし[/FONT], used on formal occasions, so it would sound arrogant in the context of the life of Christ, whereas the more normal [FONT= ]わたし[/FONT] doesn’t distract the reader.

Of course, we didn’t even consider the other ways to say “I” in Japanese: [FONT= ]おのれ[/FONT] (onore, classical), [FONT= ]ぼく[/FONT] (boku, youthful male), [FONT= ]おれ[/FONT] (ore, male slang), [FONT= ]わし[/FONT] (washi, aged man), [FONT= ]あたし[/FONT] (atashi, youthful girl), etc. Ah, yes, trust the Japanese language to make a simple word difficult!

 

Why Mexdeaf, you've been studying Japanese, seeking to add it to the Spanish and sign language you already know! :thumbsup: Are you ready to come to work in Japan?

 

You know, God gave me a love for those squiggles! My two years of Japanese language school were two of the best of my life. I loved learning all those little written characters, and reveled in it when they put me in a class with all Chinese people!

 

Common Semantic Mistakes of the Translator​

I’d like to finish off this thread with an explanation of some of the more common mistakes a translator must work to avoid in determining meaning. This is by no means all there are! I’m sure when I work on files from my editors tomorrow morning and then get together with Uncle Miya tomorrow afternoon I’ll find a new way to miss a meaning!

First of all, translating completely by concordance is a big mistake. To translate by concordance means to render every single appearance of a word in the original language by the exact same word in the target language. It is said that this is one mistake the English Revised Version and the American Revised Version made: “The Revised Versions…sought to render a given word in the original by the same English word consistently, regardless of its context. In their view, faithfulness to the original demanded a meticulous word-by-word rendering” (So Many Versions?, revised edition, by Sakae Kubo and Walter F. Specht, p. 46).

As any trained linguist and anyone fluent in a foreign language knows, one word may have a wide range of meaning, depending on the context. So for a Bible translator, it is a big mistake to think that a certain Greek or Hebrew word must be translated the same way every time.

Think of the Greek word aggeloV (aggelos, pronounced “angelos”). It literally means “messenger, but normally should be translated “angel.” However, there are exceptions! Consider just one example. James 2:25 is translated “messengers” in the KJV, and that is correct, since it is referring to the spies that Rahab protected in the promised land.

 

Yeah, I'd give several hours to Ukranian. :smilewinkgrin:

 

Bible software is an excellent tool, allowing the least of us to do some first class research on Bible words once they learn the software. Even my bottom of the line PowerBible CD lets you do some wonderful searches.

Right. This is where the advanced training comes in, all you can get: Biblical languages, of course; translation theory; linguistics; theology. Amazing to think that the old timers were all self-trained, from Jerome through Adoniram Judson and William Carey.

Glad you're enjoying it! :wavey:

 

Another common mistake a translator might make is the anachronism. This is the error of taking a modern concept and reading it back into the ancient culture. For example, in Matt. 3:4, the infamous Cotton Patch Version says, “This guy John was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, and he was living on corn bread and collard greens” (So Many Versions, p. 329). There are no less than four anachronisms in this one sentence! The most ignorant Bible reader would know that John couldn’t have worn blue jeans or a leather jacket, and chances are very to none that he would have eaten corn bread and collard greens. And of course such renderings do not help the reader understand the Bible.

Along this line, a difficult decision by the translator is how to handle weights and measurements. He has two choices. He can update the weights and measurements to modern times, having the Biblical terms be pounds and feet, or meters and grams. Or he can transliterate the original terms into his New Testament, preserving the flavor of the era of the Bible. We have elected to transliterate all of the Bible weights and measures, giving the modern measurements in footnotes. In this way the reader knows he is reading an ancient document. Secular author Lawrence Venuti has dealt with this issue extensively in The Translator’s Invisibility.

 

I should have posted this right after I talked about translating completely by concordance, but here it is late.

Notice I said that the translator should not translate completely by concordance. I chose my word carefully. The translator should translate by concordance to the extent that a word has the same meaning in various places in the NT.

My example for this is the Greek word nomoV (nomos), usually translated as "law," yet having a somewhat wide range of meaning. In my first draft I went with the Japanese word 掟 (okite, pr. oh-key-teh), which has a similar wide range of meaning: law, rule, principle, etc. However, Uncle Miya scotched that, saying the Japanese word was too general. So, every time the context showed that the Jewish law was meant, we translated with concordance with the traditional Japanese word for that, 律法 (rippou). And occasionally we went with "principle" or "rule." So sometimes concordance is right, and sometimes it's not.

 

A similar error to the anachronism is what secular translation scholar Lawrence Venuti calls "domesticizing" in his landmark book, The Translator’s Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), “in which the foreign text is imprinted with values specific to the receiving culture (p. 40). According to Venuti, in a domesticized translation, “Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the receiving culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies” (ibid, p. 14). As an example of this, Venuti spends a lot of time discussing how the Greek classics (such as Homer or Catullus) are translated with modern mores and morals, when in reality they are filled with homosexuality, crudity, coarseness and pagan sexuality. (Of course I am not by any means comparing the Bible to pagan Greek and Roman works.)

How does all of this work in a Bible translation? On Friday afternoon Uncle Miya and I were working on the book of James when we came across the word “man” in 3:2, “For in many things we offend all. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” At first glance Uncle Miya felt we should translate as “person” instead of “man” (Japanese 男, otoko—an interesting Chinese character, using the radicals for “strength” and “field,” meaning a man is one who uses his strength for husbandry). When I pointed out to Uncle Miya that this is the Greek word anhr (aner), meaning definitely a man, he saw the point right away. I’ll have to admit, though, it was a temptation to translate “person,” thinking that women have just as much trouble controlling their tongues!

We can’t reasonably take 21st century values of gender equality and force them on 1st century people. And of course that is a major controversy in Bible translation circles today. But I believe we must take the Bible as it is. Every jot and tittle of the original is the Word of God, verbally and plenary inspired.

 

Another area in which a translator can make serious mistakes in semantics is the careless use of religious terms from the target culture. While some words such as “prayer” are fairly common to the various religions in a given culture, there are others which if used in a Bible translation will give a completely wrong impression to the reader.

Toshikazu Foley gives some examples of using Buddhist terms for Christian concepts from possible Nestorian translations of the NT into Chinese in the July 2008 edition of the UBS Journal “The Biblical Translator” in his article, “Translating Biblical Texts into Chinese: The Pioneer Venture of the Nestorian Missionaries” (p. 115; http://www.ubs-translations.org/fileadmin/publications/tbt/technical/TBT_TP_Foley_Jul_08.pdf). The Nestorians used fa wang (法王), the contemporary term for a Buddhist priest, for their priests. They used seng (僧) for a monk, though it was a Buddhist term (and is to this day even in Japan) and si (寺), a Buddhist Temple, for Christian congregations and monasteries.

Though Foley appears to think the Nestorian use of Buddhist terms was a positive thing, I consider it to be a huge mistake. If we were to use that last term si (寺, tera in Japanese) for the Jewish temple in our Japanese NT, what impression would the average Japanese gain from the Word of God? The idea of another religion would not immediately come to their minds. They would wonder what Christ and later the apostles were doing at a Buddhist temple. The end result would be confusion, not clarity. (This is all related to the concept in missiology of contextualization, which I don’t have time to get into here.)

Along this line, there is a big debate among Bible translators in Muslim lands as to whether Allah is an appropriate word to use for the God of the Bible. Questions I would ask would include: What image of God does the average Muslim have when he reads “Allah”? Is there another word in that particular language that would give a better impression of the God of the Bible, or would another term lead a Muslim to think of idolatry? These are by no means simple issues, and the wise translator would take a lot of time to think and research before answering.

 

Another area where the translator is liable to error is that of nuance. It is easy to mistake the nuance of a word in either the original language or the target language. To give just one example in Greek, the difference between agapaw (agapao) and filew (phileo) is by no means clear. In John 21:15-20, both words are used, and the translator must decide what the nuance is. Should they be translated differently, maybe as “love” versus “fond of” (my position), or both as “love,” just a stylistic difference with John using synonyms for effect (my son’s position)? Either way, the translator must choose what nuance he wants to emphasize. And there is a definite potential for error.

In the target language, here is where the translator absolutely must depend on his national partner or helper. The word “forgive” in Japanese is a case in point. In the spoken language the verbs for “forgive” and “permit” are homonyms, both being ゆるす(yurusu). This makes teaching God’s forgiveness difficult! Fortunately, in the written language you can use different Chinese characters, 許す for permit and 赦す for forgive. Even so, it has always galled me that I might be saying “God forgives sin,” but the listener might be hearing “God permits sin.” So I came up with a different word that seems to fit the bill, 容赦する (yohsha suru), meaning to forgive. However, Uncle Miya informed me that this word is only used in the negative, as in “This is an unforgiveable crime.” Therefore it would be inappropriate to use it for God’s forgiveness. Nuance—can’t get away from it!

With this I’m done with the thread unless someone wants to ask questions or discuss methods. Thanks to each of you who read and commented. God bless!

 

Glad you enjoyed it, Brother Jim.

God bless.