The Impact of Translating

A friend asks, “How did translating The Second Testament change you? What is the lasting impact (if any) the work will leave on you?”

If one reads closely the New Testament in Greek for the four hours a day for most weekdays over two years, one cannot avoid impact. Here’s what my days were like. I was at my computer with the Greek text open and one or two or three lexicons near me and easy access to Greek grammars. Sorry but I still like Blass, Debrunner, Funk alongside its German edition by Rehkopf.  I varied which English translations I read as after I translated a passage. And I used the Baylor Greek guides as well.

First impact: familiarity makes translating difficult. My familiarity with the text, translations, and my own traditional rendering got in the way on every verse. We have habitual patterns of taking a Greek term or expression and rendering them into our dynamic equivalents. Familiarity works in which English words we use to translate which Greek term. Our glosses are so familiar they have become right. Our familiarity has been shaped by lexicons of the NT that were written by Christians who have learned to gloss Greek terms with dense Christian theological terms. Choosing the word “justification” in English cannot but load the deck for a translator. What we have imported and imputed (clever, eh?) into that term was well beyond what any 1^st Century writer would have meant. We need to be stunned in order to reconsider our translation. I’m not saying “justification” for dikaiosynē is wrong; I’m saying it’s Christian theological jargon that prevents our hearing the text as it was originally written. I use the word “rightness” and “right” and “to right [as in right the ship].”

Second impact: I believe the lexica most of use provide biased glosses for Greek words. The English terms provided have been Christianized over time. So much so the classical Greek lexica (LSJ, Brill’s new one, Cambridge’s new one) can shock us with their glosses. We might go looking for a more familiar, which means Christian, gloss.

Third impact: reading a NT text, say the Gospel of Luke or Hebrews, without any need to write a commentary, or a rewording, or a discussion about a problem, permitted me to keep the pace of moving forward in the text day by day. Reading the text this way swallowed me into the text in ways I rarely get to experience. Mind you, I’m talking 3-4 hours each weekday. The book that came more alive to me in translating the NT was the Book of Acts. All I had done with Acts in my teaching career is about 3-4 lectures, maybe five or six pages of single spaced notes.

Fourth impact: I don’t want to get spooky here, nor do I want to make any claims for Spirit-led translation choices, but I do. At times I just sensed, from poring over the Greek text each day, a Spirit-prompting to see a word or an expression or a sentence in a fresh way. When I open up The Second Testament now I find myself smiling over how I translated something. I recall the moments coming to those decisions – every word requires a decision – and why I chose what I did, and sometimes I smile. A kind of I like that moment. I like “God blesses the beggars in spirit because theirs is Heavens’ Empire.” Not everyone does, but I do. I hope that translations slows you down and causes you to wonder what it does differently than what your translation does.

Fifth impact: daily, hourly, I paused in thanks to God for what I was getting to do when IVP asked me to translate The Second Testament. I paused in worship over texts like Romans 3 or Philippians 2 or Revelation 4-5. How does one measure the impact of daily worship? Subtle but real perceptions, worship, challenges.

Sixth impact: I became grateful for the hard work of those who have gone before me. It’s hard to translate in a way that seeks to find one English word to one Greek word, though I learned I could not do it always. It’s hard to grind away at looking at the text, looking at lexica, looking at grammars, looking at the computer screen, looking at my translation, looking at other translations. The back and forth can be dizzying. What was hardest at times was realizing I had found a single English word for a single Greek term – say poreuomai and “I journey” – and that now I had to find everyone in the NT and change each one to fit the decision (146 appearances in the NT!). When I found choices like this later rather than earlier, or realized later that earlier choices wouldn’t work, I might spend two hours adjusting or readjusting or going back to the earlier.

Another hard task was translating the Synoptic Gospels. I did not check the other translations on this but this was my rule: if two or three of the Synoptics have the same Greek then my translation had to be the same. Which meant an adjustment to Luke, which I did last of the three Synoptics, meant an adjustment to both Mark and Matthew at times, and at times this meant to each time that word appeared in all three Gospels. I loved doing this, but it was worth the effort to help the curious Bible reader to see how the passages are identical or slightly different.

Finally, don’t criticize any translation until you’ve put your hand to a whole NT book (Jude and Philemon and 1-3 John don’t count). It’s harder than you think, and every translator I know has good reasons for the choices she made. I don’t like how the NIV handles the Greek word ergon/erga with “deeds” when they think it is positive and “works” when they think it is negative. But I know why they do that; they have their reasons. I have mine. Both of us deserve a hearing.

I welcome your questions.