Bible Translations Again

Tue, 07/08/2007 - 10:09 -- James Oakley

I little while ago, I posted about different Bible translations. My post on this blog was simply a copy of a comment a posted on a friend’s blog, in response to his request for advice on which English translation to use for serious study.

I had two follow-ups to that post. One friend asked how I compared the ESV to the NKJV. The honest answer was that I had not worked much with the NKJV.

The other response was in the form of other comments on Jon’s blog, responding to mine. I had referred to the New Living Translation as at the paraphrase end of things, and several NLT devotees piled in to correct me. The honest answer was that I had not worked much with the NLT either. Oops! Unscholarly and unprofessional, so I apologise for asserting confidently about things that I know nothing about. In truth, I assumed that a translation called the “NLT” had to share some character with its predecessor the Living Bible; otherwise the name would be misleading. That’s possibly why I haven’t, thus far, done much work with the NKJV.

(Has anyone heard of the “International Version”?)

Anyway, time for a follow-up post, by means of a worked example. 1 Cor 9:22b. The Greek for which is toi/j pa/sin ge,gona pa,nta( i[na pa,ntwj tina.j sw,swÃ…==. (You’ll have to have the Bible Works font, BWGRKL to see that properly). My over-literal translation of this is “To all I am become all things, in order that by all means I might save some.”

Here are the English translations:

  • New American Standard: “I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some.”
  • English Standard: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”
  • King James: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
  • New King James: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
  • Revised Standard: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
  • New Revised Standard: “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
  • New International Version: “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”
  • Today’s New Internatinal Version: “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”
  • New Living Translation: “Yes, I try to find common ground with everyone so that I might bring them to Christ.”
  • Amplified Bible: “I have [in short] become all things to all men, that I might by all means (at all costs and in any and every way) save some [by winning them to faith in Jesus Christ].”
  • The Message: “I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life.”
  • Good News Bible: “So I become all things to all men, that I may save some of them by whatever means are possible.”

That’s enough for now!

What do we notice. The first thing we notice is that the TNIV is the same as the NIV, the NRSV is the same thing as the RSV – except for changing “men” to “people”. In this case, this is correct. There is no word in the Greek for “men” – it is just masculine word for “all”, which denotes a mixed group as much as a masculine group. Stylistically, when the NIV and RSV were produced, “men” was probably a good translation for this. Today it is not, and “people” is an improvement. (Note that the NRSV and TNIV go over the top on inclusive language, see my original post, or just look at Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2).

The next thing we notice is that the NIV does slightly amplify what is there, to try and convey the force of “all means”. The result is “all possible means” – showing how the NIV is slightly towards the “thought for thought” end of things compared to, say, the RSV. They try to convey the sense as much as to translate. There is no word in the Greek for “possible”.

Then, the Amplified Bible and the Message are clearly proper paraphrases. The sentence they end up with just is not there in the Greek. In fairness to the NLT, we have a sentence that vaguely corresponds to the Greek sentence we are trying to translated. Nevertheless, “I try to find common ground with everyone” is an interpretive paraphrase compared to “I am all things to all”. It seems that the NLT is a paraphrase, albeit a less loose one than the traditional paraphrases.

The Good News Bible appears to try to be as true to the sentence structure of the original whilst maintaining its translation goal of being readable by someone with a reading age of 7. The result is very readable and not too far off.

It’s hard to compare the more word-for-word translations in this verse – the sentence just isn’t hard enought to translate. I like the KJV’s “I am made” as rendering the perfect tense – but presumably nobody else went for it because it just isn’t good English.

No grand conclusions. Just a worked example. The conclusions are the same as my original post. 1. Preferably learn Greek and Hebrew. 2. Failing that / Having done that, use several English translations. 3. The paraphrases are of a different character altogether – which does not render them useless, but means we need to know what we are reading.

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Comments

Neil's picture
Submitted by Neil on

Wow. New design, and radically different. Is this the Good News blog, or the Revised Standard?!

ros's picture
Submitted by ros on

Helpful exercise. I remember one time when I was learning Greek, my teacher at the time used to do this kind of thing and we were all surprised at how often the GNB did a good job.

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