Difficult words

They say that reading a translation is like looking at the back of a tapestry or cross-stitch—you might still be able to determine the picture, but there’s lots of messy bits of thread.

Have you even tried to tell a joke to someone in a different language:

What did the grape say when it got crushed? Nothing, it just let out a little wine.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

To the guy who invented zero, thanks for nothing.

The first two rely on English language similarities (wine/whine, and two meanings of flies) and the second relies on an English idiom, and they are almost guaranteed not to work if you translate them into a different language. But the Bible writers use similar linguistic tricks and sadly, we often lose the double-meaning in our translations—it’s just a fact of life.

For example, there’s a parallel between ‘Jesus being raised on a pole’ (like the bronze snake in the time of Moses), and ‘Jesus being raised from the dead’. If we modernise it to say, ‘Jesus being lifted up on a pole’ and ‘Jesus coming back to life from the dead’, then we can lose that connection.

The opposite problem also occurs in all English Bible translations. There’s a Greek word πίστις (pistis) that’s usually translated as ‘faith’ and sometimes as ‘faithfulness’. But when the related Greek verb πιστεύω (pisteuō) is translated, ‘to faith’ doesn’t work as a verb in English so we have to use ‘to believe’, but you can see that the English words ‘faith’ and ‘believe’ don’t show the same connections to each other as the original ‘pistis’ and ‘pisteuō’ do.

Other words are difficult because they’ve changed their cultural meaning over the millennia. Words like ‘soldier’ and ‘army’, ‘priest’ and ‘church’, ‘slave’ and ‘servant’, ‘lord’ and ‘master’, even ‘road’ and ‘house’ are all still recognisable, yet culturally they’re almost totally different now.

Finally there’s some commonly used English Biblical terms like ‘disciple’, ‘apostle’, ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘sin’, ‘saint’ and ‘sanctify’, ‘holy’, ‘glory’, ‘rejoice’, ‘blessed’, and many others that aren’t used in regular office conversations, yet must be handled in any Bible translation. There’s no easy solution to handling some of them, but we’re working on the hard stuff…

Robert Hunt, 1 September 2023