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       Writing/Language, (zaibatsu), 12/05/2018
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(In case anyone is averse, this post isn't about religion,
it's about language and writing. I'm not a Bible expert,
these are just thoughts on the construction of the thing.)

Took the kids to a parade in town the other day (a Christmas
parade I think? Yeah, Santa was sitting on a fire truck...)
During the parade people were throwing candy and passing out
stuff. One fellow came up and handed me a little pocked New
Testament from the Gideons[1]. Every time I think of the
Gideons, I think of the bible villain in Mission Impossible.
I almost handed it back- I have plenty of Bibles- but
decided to keep it.

Flipping through the front matter while the marching bands
walked past, I noticed that this little New Testament was
the ESV translation[2]. I'm a KJV sort of guy for my reading
in English. I like the archaic style, and it's the one they
use at church. But, I have read the Louis Segond in
French[3], and I have a couple other French ones from the
Catholic Church that I flip through as well (The Bible of
Jerusalem, and a little pocket NT, not sure about the
translation, feels more modern.) To be honest, I've never
bothered with the "newer" translations in English, but not
because I have any animosity toward them[4].

I looked up some info on the ESV. There were some bible
thumping types online howling about doctrinal problems, so I
educated myself a bit on the textus receptus[4] vs. the
Nestle-Aland[5]. This is basic stuff for a lot of folks, I
think, but I just hadn't bothered with it. I got my two
greek NT's down from the top shelf, and realized they were
Nestle-Aland (with the Latin and Greek) and Nestle-Marshall
(1964.) Now I wish I had the textus receptus interlinear
with translation (since I don't know much greek.)

My opinion is that it can only enrich my understanding to
read and compare translations of a book, so I decided to
read the ESV. I'm in Mark, I'll finish it in a month or so,
unless life gets the better of me.

Learning another language- and I'm not sure this is
universally true, but I noted it learning French- you find
that translation is often a matter of finding the right
single word in the target language that best conveys the
idea expressed by the source language. At times you
encounter words that are complex enough that they don't
translate into a single word in another language. I'm sure
volumes have been written on the subject, and since they'd
be more instructive than my musing anyway, I'll quote one
such volume:

"Exact equivalence is of course impossible: no translator
could provide a translation that was a perfect parallel to
the source text, in such respects as rhythm, sound
symbolism, puns, and cultural allusions. Such a parallel is
not even possible when paraphrasing within a single
language: there is always some loss of information."

That's from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David
Crystal, an exceptional book (not sure about editions, mine
is oldish from an information age standpoint.) It's logical,
but with the Bible there's an interesting twist: some folks
believe that the Bible was insulated from doctrinal
translation errors because it was God's book.

I said up front that I wasn't going to talk about religion,
so I should probably move on, but from a language/writing
perspective this poses an interesting problem: what do you
do when you encounter obvious translation problems in a book
that isn't allowed to have them? And, is it good to disallow
human error in *any* situations? Is it reasonable and
viable?

All thoughts that i'll have to figure out some other time.
For now, I'll just read this ESV through and see what I can
see. So far, it's about the same.

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Gideons International
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/English Standard Version
[3] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Louis Segond
[4] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/King James Only movement
[5] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Textus Receptus
[6] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Novum Testamentum Graece

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