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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Regarding “hard choices” when translating: what about not making them?

If the goal isn’t to editorialize on purpose, could one just write, “[young girl|virgin]” when faced with what the “correct” translation is supposed to be?

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There are some 1500 hapax legomena in the Old Testament, means words that appear only once and, by extension, whose exact meaning is often unknown. How do you translate them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon

Ah makes sense. That is indeed vexing.

If we have complete gaps in our knowledge of the language, then there’s no room for anything but editorialization.

Should they be translated then? Leaving then unchanged would communicate the fact that the word has no direct translation. English has borrowed and invented lots of words which have no direct meaning, they just are a subtle way to express a concept - e.g. "grok"

A lot of work in Bible translation over the millennia has been motivated by translators’ desire to make the most important document in history, the stuff of salvation and life itself, accessible to the common man.

Luckily, there is room in the world for (and demand for) countless approaches to Biblical translation, from the hyper‐literal to the simple paraphrase.

Any person who’s participated in a group Bible study (except in those kooky KJV‐only cults) has experienced reading Bible passages out loud in a circle of people, each of whom happens to be quoting a different translation of the same text.

*what they believe it's the most important document in history (because most have been indoctrinated from a very young age to believe so)

I was describing these people’s motivation. It goes without saying that that’s what they believe.

No it doesn't go without saying, specially because it means the translations are extremely biased towards showing a positive view of the texts and towards translations likely to reinforce their existing believes.

“Bob Johnson’s fundraising efforts for John Smith’s campaign were motivated by a desire to seat the best candidate as President.”

Does that sentence say that Smith is the best candidate? No, it says that Johnson thinks that.

Would it be better if it were reworded to “…were motivated by a desire to seat who he thought was the best candidate as President”? No, that would just be redundant.

Does the original sentence imply that Johnson holds an unbiased, objective opinion of Smith? Of course not. If anything, it implies the opposite!

In your example "a desire" is unambiguously "the desire of Bob Johnson", but in your initial comment "a desire" is not part of a sentence or even paragraph that mentions an individual or a group, therefore is likely to make the readers assume the author (in this case you) is the one making the claim (in this case that means assuming you are the one who believes it's the most important document)

Well, you assumed wrong. To make it clearer, I’ve amended “a desire” to “translators’ desire” in the original comment.

If you search online it is easy to find parallel texts showing, say, the Koine Greek and English side by side. I think you should try to see what you make of them.

> the translations are extremely biased towards showing a positive view of the texts

That's certainly not true of reputable translations - you can easily verify this by just glancing at something widely available like e.g. an annotated version of the NIV - the scholarship and scrupulous attention to detail is evident.

The critical apparatus on the NET Bible is massive. The notes are well worth reading and probably unparalleled for anyone interested in ancient document translation.

Agreed - I find them fascinating.

Since a lot of people put a lot of faith in these texts, their importance is not just a mere belief.

The word that I meant to emphasize there was "most", as in of course there is a practical importance involved in any document people give importance, but "importance" in 2 very different contexts, one from the metaphysical/spiritual knowledge they believe it has vs the behaviors it incites among it's believers.

The version I use is superior though ;)

"Grok" isn't really a good example - it was invented by a recent English speaker and used quite enough that it was clear enough what it meant (I'm not sure if Heinlein explained it outright but I don't believe he objected to various definitions published. Further if you do consider it a word in another language it translates reasonably directly into "understand intuitively" in standard English, not much different to how the word "get" is often used.)

Leaving a word untranslated (but transliterated into modern English orthography as best as possible), with footnotes explaining possible meanings is seemingly sensible enough but the Bible is meant to be the "word of God", and leaving it sprinkled with words that nobody's sure about the meaning of would tend to undermine its attempt to sound authoritative on matters spiritual.

I also like The Simpsons’ word, “cromulent.”

It has no meaning and yet it seems to fit in a lot of places. It’s almost like a parity correction: we’re missing data here, just fill in the blank based on the context.

A famous example of which is 'daily' in 'give us this day our daily bread' (technically a 'dis legomenon' since it occurs twice, but since it is in identical passages, the repetition doesn't help) - it's something that's still said so frequently and yet we have no good way of knowing what the original word actually meant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiousios

Also how do you translate concepts that were clearly known to the readers to modern times. Do you entrust that readers have someone to tell them what this would've meant, or do you adapt to something more apt in their language. For example in countries where they don't each bread made from wheat or that isn't a staple, daily food, what do you translate for bread?

In high school our Shakespeare books had the text on the left and explanations on the right. The explanations were mostly to deal with what you’re bringing up.

There are actually Bibles that do this (like the Interlinear), with accompanying commentaries as well. You'll often find them on the desks and shelves of preachers, because they consider it their job to dive into that research, understand it, and then convey that understanding to those who haven't been trained in the literary arts.

That's > or < what the Amplified Bible does.

It rapidly becomes unreadable?

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