Phillip’s wonderful The New Testament in Modern English (my mom became a Christian reading this book), Eugene Petersen’s The Message, and Kenneth Taylor’s original Living Bible. However, I don’t believe these should be called “Bibles” because at any point it is hard to tell what is the Bible and what is the author’s attempt to make the message of the Bible relevant to his (or her) own culture. So the Living Bible is a true paraphrase since it’s a simplification of the (English) ASV, but viewing a translation from the Hebrew and Greek as a paraphrase is an incorrect use of the term.īetter terms than “paraphrase” for this category of translations might be “contemporary relevance versions” or “transculturations” (suggestions of Mark Strauss) since these versions alter the cultural perspective of the text in order to connect to the modern reader. Linguists use “paraphrase” for a rewording for the purpose of simplification in the same language, not in a different language. As is the case with the term “literal,” we need to use words that actually mean what we say they mean. The term ”paraphrase” is sometimes used in discussions of translations, sometimes equating it with loose translations that change or distort the historical meaning of the text.
But please, don’t believe the marketing hype: there is no such thing as a “literal” translation. Will people start to use the word accurately? I hope so. As much as I’d like the word “literal” to go away, I doubt it will. If someone wants a “literal” translation, using the term “literal” in its improper sense, there is only one example of a “literal translation”: the interlinear.Īn interlinear will list the Greek words in Greek word order, and under each Greek word there will be a gloss for its meaning. LiteralĪlthough I’ve already expressed my dislike of this term, I’ll use it here to make a point. I’ll talk about the first two of them in this post. I’ve come to see that this isn’t accurate there are at least five categories of translation theory. However, most people think in terms of these two basic approaches. For example, the same translation can be formal in one verse and functional in the next. Translations don’t fit neatly into one of these approaches or the other they fit along a continuum with significant overlap. The functional (dynamic) view of translation uses the words (along with other things like grammar and context) to discover the original meaning - the “authorial intent” - and then conveys the same meaning in the target language. “Word-for-word” describes this approach.Ģ. Formal equivalence says that the purpose of translation is to adhere as closely as possible to the grammatical structures of the original language, altering the translation only when necessary to convey meaning. Most people say there are two basic approaches to translation.ġ. To put it another way, translation is the process by which we reproduce the meaning of the text translation does not replicate the form of the text. To explain this, I need to talk about what I’ve learned about translation theory in general, and it’ll take four more posts to do so. Without being simplistic, I’ve learned that translation is not translating words it’s translating meaning.
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