Translating the Bible Literally

The task of a Bible translator is certainly not an easy one. From the very beginning, Bible translators have been criticised and condemned for their efforts. Take St. Jerome, the translator of the famous Latin Vulgate Bible, as an example. He already feared the reactions of others even before he started working on his translation. When asked by Pope Damascus to undertake this task in the fourth century, Jerome replied,

The labor is one of love, but at the same time it is both perilous and presumptuous—for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all. … Is there anyone learned or unlearned, who, when he takes the volume in his hands and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, will not break out immediately into violent language and call me a forger and profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections in them?

Jerome did, however, take this risk and carry out the task of translating the Bible. And as expected, or maybe even more so than expected, his fears of being criticised for his translation of the Bible proved to be well founded. In AD 395, he felt compelled to write a letter defending his translation ‘against the accusation of ignorance and falsehood’. Later in history, however, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate became the Bible of choice for the Roman Catholic Church, and at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) it was declared the only ‘right and official’ Bible to the exclusion of all others. Other Bible translators in history were similarly criticised and condemned for their efforts. In the 14th century, John Wycliffe, the translator of the first complete Bible in English, was denounced by Archbishop Arundel simply for the act of translating the Bible into English, without any consideration for the quality of his translation:

This pestilent and wretched John Wyclif, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent … endeavoured by every means to attack the very faith and sacred doctrine of the Holy Church, devising – to fill up the measure of his malice – the expedient of a new translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue.

At that time, the Roman Catholic Church, whose influence spread across Europe, insisted that the Bible be read only in Latin, and therefore a translation of the Bible into the mother tongue was viewed as an attack on the authority of the Church. Wycliffe died a natural death in 1384, but some forty-four years after his death ‘Pope Martin V insisted that Wycliffe’s body be exhumed, burned, and his ashes cast into the river’.

Two centuries later, during the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, Bible translators such as Martin Luther in Germany and William Tyndale in England were still being branded heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, partly also because Luther and Tyndale wanted the people to be able to read Bible in their own language. Tyndale suffered a martyr’s death. In 1536, strangled and burned at the stake for his convictions. Luther, on the other hand, was fortunate to receive protection Protestant prince-elector and live in one of the German states that supported translation of the Bible. Over time, the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards Bible translation changed, so that a translation of the Bible into the mother tongue became more and more accepted.

Today, the Bible is the most translated book in the world. By the end of the year 2015, the complete Bible had been made available in 563 languages and the New Testament or other Bible portions had been made available in a further 2,372 languages.

The English speaking world alone is flooded with a vast amount of Bible translations, and new translations of the Scriptures are continually being published. In this day and age, the question no longer seems to be ‘Should we translate the Bible?’, but rather ‘How should we translate the Bible?’. In answer to the second question, Bible translator and translation scholar Eugene Nida has distinguished between two different methods of translating the Bible – namely, to aim for either formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence translations are also referred to as literal or word-for-word translations. According to Nida, this kind of translation is ‘basically source-oriented; that is, it is designed to reveal as much as possible of the form and content of the original message’. A dynamic equivalence translation in contrast, directs its attention ‘not so much toward the source message, as toward the receptor response’. These kinds of translations are also called free or sense-for-sense translations. Both of these methods can be applied to Bible translation, but Nida tends to encourage the aim of dynamic equivalence to ensure that the focus is more on translating the message of the Bible rather than translating the actual words of the Bible.

It is quite understandable, therefore, that these two different methods also bring about different results in English Bible translations. It is also quite understandable how there may be a variety of dynamic equivalence translations, depending on the audience for which the translation is made. There are special English Bible translations geared towards children, youth, feminists, deaf people and people who speak Cockney or street slang, just to name a few.

At the same time, however, there are quite a number of English Bible translations which all claim to be literal. How can this be? Are literal translations not supposed to be an accurate reflection of the individual words of the original text? If this is the case, then why do literal translations differ from one another? Are some translations more literal than others? Are there different concepts and perceptions of what constitutes literalness in Bible translation? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this book.