Featured Linguistics and Bible Translation

No argument there. And it tends to be rather idiomatic.

Sounds like triple murder at least!

 

I experienced a tiny bit of that while flying from Narita to SFO with ANA. Sitting next to me was a young Japanese woman, maybe 20s. (I'm terrible at guessing ages of adult women - Black, Oriental, White, doesn't matter.) As soon as the seat belt light went out, she asked if she could move so as not to be next to an Occidental. She got an upgraded seat and mine became a bit worse. That said, the Japanese flight attendants on the ANA flights were much more helpful than the Americans on its partner, United.

 

My son began teaching English in Japan in 2003 but came back to Maine for 6 months in 2008-09 when his employer, Nova, went belly up thanks to chicanery by leadership. In March 2009 he returned to Japan, teaching English since then. (Also married a Japanese woman who is a real sweetheart.) About 7 years ago he earned a Masters degree online, which qualified him for teaching at the college level, currently in Nagoya. In 2016 when they still lived in Gifu Prefecture, we were able to visit for a week plus. It was 1-2 weeks too early for the cherry blossoms but a wonderful time just the same.

 

We are proud of him and love Yuka as well, but we pray every day for their salvation.
Two of the highlights of our visit were the markets at Kyoto and Ogaki - the kids lived at the latter in 2016. The Kyoto market is much the bigger but is also more touristy. At Ogaki we were the only gaijin in sight the day we visited.

 

Whereas not many months ago, I bought a book on New Testament Greek, intending to learn the whole language for study of the New Testament, at the time I had received it, I could not even persevere long enough to learn the entire alphabet; but I believed learning the Greek alphabet to be the most difficult thing, by reason of the strangeness of the letters.

 

I'm curious, what do you think about Heterogeneous Language Translations?

Here in the Philippines, the Philippine Bible Society recently released Pinoy Version, a contemporary translation that targets Gen Z, which uses the Heterogeneous Language, Taglish.

Taglish is code-switching and/or code-mixing in the use of Tagalog and English. This became the defacto Lingua Franca among the vast majority of Filipinos, especially the young people. It is rare to find a native speaker that only uses Tagalog or Filipino without frequently switching from it and English back and forth.

Of course this caused some controversy among some people as Taglish is informal.

According to PBS:

The Pinoy Version is a dynamic translation or a meaning-based translation of the New Testament. PBS believes that the language used in the Bible translation should be similar to the way people speak. That is what the Pinoy Version is trying to capture, the way people speak. It is more than being contemporary because it approximates the spoken form of the language, not the written form. The PVNT meets all the standards of a UBS Bible translation project: First, it is accurate, being faithful to its textual base, the UBS Greek NT 5th ed. Second, it has no doctrinal bias, and third, it is easy to understand because it chooses the most natural way of saying something.​

What are your thoughts?

 

I think that they've made a good decision, and although there are already Filipino Translations, from the feedback that I've heard, many young people started to read the Bible.

I think they've scaled down the use of English words as the typical Taglish sentence usually incorporates one or more English words almost every sentence. I purchased the NT and the recently released Psalms and Proverbs, and I think that although I disagree with some of the words they used, I think they made a great translation overall.

Yeah, pretty much those who criticized the PV are older folk. They say it's disrespectful to God because it's informal and modern. Taglish started sometime in the 70s so most people, even older ones, know and speak Taglish. It's pretty rare to hear someone speak in pure Tagalog.

I agree with your position, UBS versions really like dynamic equivalence translations. Most of Tagalog and Cebuano translations that I know of are dynamic equivalence translations and are made by PBS. While their goal is to make the Bible understandable, sometimes some rendering goes too far and more explanatory. In many cases, they don't leave footnotes about the original Hebrew/Greek rendering.

In my opinion, they've captured the speaking form, not the written one, and it shows, as I sometimes it feels weird when reading a verse that I know natural to say but weird to read. I don't know how to describe it, but nevertheless I thinks it's a great translation for my fellow Gen Z's and God will use it to reach out.