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You have contradicted yourself MM.

 

Allow me to quote from my homeboys, Doctors Fee and Strauss :

"Consider the Greek phrase that begins Mark's Gospel: Arche tou euangeliou Ie sou Christou (Mark 1:1). Most beginning Greek students would consider this to be simple Greek, which can be translated, 'The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ'....Yet even this is not a 'literal' translation. The Greek grammatical forms are NOUN + GENITIVE PHRASE + GENITIVE PHRASE. The grammatical forms of the English translation are DEFINITE ARTICLE + NOUN + PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE + PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE. Almost all of the grammatical forms were changed to produce this supposedly 'literal' translation....What seems at first to be a simple and direct translation is in fact an interpretation using different English forms to express the same meaning. This kind of interpretation occurs in almost every sentence in the Bible." (p.28)

 

I will be quoting snips from Robert Alter's book The Art Of Bible Translation. He is not a Christian, but a consideration of his thoughts are valuable. He is a Hebraist, so he comes with a great deal of knowledge.

"The practice of translation, as I have learned from experience, entails an endless series of compromises, some of them happy, some painful, and not quite right because the translator has been unable to find an adequate English equivalent for what is happening --often brilliantly --in the original language." [p. ix]

"A translator's successes, which inevitably occur in the midst of half successes and partial failures, are occasionally quite visible to readers, as, for example, when he gets lucky and manages to find a happy English equivalent for a pun in the original. Successes of rhythm, however, are likely to be invisible to most readers, and they will be chiefly gratifying to the translator himself, though I think at least subliminally they contribute in some way to the satisfying experience of the narrative of the narrative for the reader." [p.85]

"As a translator, you find yourself constantly weighing sound against meaning, fidelity to the original against idiomatic aptness in the target language, and you are often not entirely sure that you have made the right decision....it is not feasible or even desirable to produce an exact replication of the rhythmic patterns of the Hebrew, but some evocation in English of the strong rhythms of the Hebrew is indispensable in order to convey an adequate sense of what is compelling about biblical literature." [p.102]

"Translations, as I have conceded several times, are inevitably approximations of the original, but all of us engaged in the enterprise need to aspire to closer approximations." [p.121]

 

The following passages are taken from D.A. Carson's The Limits Of Functional Equivalence In Bible Translation found in the larger work The Challenge Of Bible Translation.

"...translation is an inexact discipline that involves compromise -- give and take -- and that there are subtleties in the source text that demand the most careful evaluation about how best to preserve them without introducing too many extraneous notions." (p.81)

"The aim of a good translation is to convey the total content, or as much of it as possible in roughly equivalent compass -- informational, emotional, connotational, etc.--- of the original message to the reader (or hearer, where the translation is publicly read) in the receptor language. (p.96)