How Much Paraphrase? Revisited

January 18, 2024 at 11:39 am | Posted in English Bible Translations, Questions for Pastor Glenn | 1 Comment

My article and chart called “How Much Paraphrase” recently received an inquiry asking the criteria I used for the chart. I sent a short response to the effect, as the article states, that it was a subjective process. Personally, I don’t think it can be a scientific process. The comment seems to imply that more literal means more accurate. To the credit of the man asking, he sent me a separate email and doesn’t seem to equate those things in it. Below is my long response to that question, if indeed it is believed that literal means accurate.

Thanks for your inquiry into my blog about literal and paraphrase Bible translations.  I have a couple of responses.

Since you are from a country where numerous languages are spoken, and are studying English Bible history, I assume you are fluent in at least two, and maybe more, languages.  I admire that; languages have always been a struggle for me.  I tease that I have trouble learning only one.  Certainly then you know that accuracy and literal in translation are different things.  Sometimes figures of speech and localization of words make literal translations impossible to understand.  As an extreme example, do you know the old English phrase “don’t beat a dead horse”?  In some languages, maybe one you know well, a literal translation of that phrase would be meaningless.  Depending on the context of that phrase, the most accurate translation would be something like, “stop going over the same material again and again,” or “quit arguing a position that’s proven to be false,” or “I’ve already made up my mind about it, so stop pleading,” etc.

By literal many people mean word-for-word translation.  You know that words in one language have a range of meaning that may not directly overlap the range of meanings in another language.  Another example would be the English word “trunk.”  What is a literal translation of that word?  In my culture it can mean the fattest part of a tree; the nose of an elephant; the storage area in the back of a car; a storage box; someone’s body; the main artery of a river; and in plural can mean a man’s swimsuit or his underwear!  That word requires a broad context to understand, and sometimes, to be accurate, a slight paraphrase would be better.  That’s why lexicons often give many potential translations for any given word.

Also, grammars differ from language to language.  So sometimes a different tense or voice can require different words in another language for accuracy in translation.  For instance the New Testament book of First John has numerous continuous present verbs that don’t translate into simple English presents, otherwise you would read things like, “No one who is born of God sins.”  That’s why many translations say something like, “No one who is born of God practices sin.”  This is an accurate translation but can’t be called a very literal one, since the word “practice” is not in the original

With that understanding, I made my chart, as it says in the article, from a strictly subjective standpoint.  This is what I said there, in case you found the chart and not the article, “Of course, this was a very subjective process, and I, in all my depravity, was the subject!  Other readers might assign the scores in a completely different way than I did, and I might do the numbers differently today, but this will give you an idea of where I place various versions of the Bible.”  The whole point was to give readers an idea of where various translations fall, and not present a scientific analysis.