Dr. Rich at Better Bibles wrote a post recently about translating a humorous comic in German. I immediately ran off to find my German linguist friend, Oliver to have him look at the comic and see if he thought it was funny. He thought it was OK.

My kids have numerous jokes that I am pretty sure are untranslatable:

• What is brown and sticky? (A stick)
• Where does the general keep his armies? (In his sleevies)
• What is an ig?  (An igloo without a loo.)

Anyone care to translate these into another language?

But what this post is really supposed to be about is quotes by Martin Luther about Bible translation.  So here goes. These come from a 1995 article by Ernst Wendland.

“Because someone has the gift of languages and understands them, that does not enable him to turn one into the other and to translate well. Translating is a special grace and gift of God.”

I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had undertaken to speak in the translation … Therefore I must let the literal words go and try to learn how the German says that which the Hebrew [or Greek] expresses … [W]ords are to serve and follow the meaning, not meaning the words.

 … what is the point of needlessly adhering so scrupulously and stubbornly to words which one cannot understand anyway? Whoever would speak German must not use Hebrew style. Rather he must see to it-once he understands the Hebrew author [hence the need for a careful exegesis!]-that he concentrates on the sense of the text, asking himself, ‘Pray tell, what do the Germans say in such a situation?’ Once he has the German words to serve the purpose, let him drop the Hebrew words and express the meaning freely in the best German he knows.

“Let my soul be filled as with lard and fat, so that my mouth may make praise with joyful lips.” By “lard and fat” the Hebrews mean joy, just as a healthy and fat animal is healthy and grows fat, and conversely, a sad animal loses weight and grows thin … However since no German can understand this expression, we have relinquished the Hebrew words and rendered the passage in clear German like this, “It would be my heart’s joy and gladness, if I were to praise thee with joyful lips.”

We do not have to inquire of the literal Latin, how we are to speak German, as these asses [that is, literalists] do. Rather we must inquire about this of the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace. We must be guided by their language, the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly. That way they will understand it and recognize that we are speaking German to them.

And my all-time favorite quote:

I have undertaken to translate the Bible into German. This was good for me; otherwise I might have died in the mistaken notion that I was a learned fellow.

In Wendland’s article he gives a wonderful example of just how “free” Luther was in translating:

Observe how Luther “germanized” the blasphemous insult of the crowd, mocking Christ beneath his cross (Mark 15.29): “Pfui dich, wie fein zerbrichst du den Tempel, und bauest ihn in drei Tagen!” In place of the original Greek exclamation oua! (NRSV has “aha!”), Luther inserts the idiomatic Pfui dich! He also considers the natural flow of speech and cuts the long sentence spanning vv. 29-30 into two. In addition, he brings out the sarcasm implied in these words by means of the initial connotative marker wie fein.

Wendland’s two articles have made a big impact on me.  I’m not sure if there is an online source for them.

Source: Ernst R. Wendland in “Martin Luther, The Father of Confessional, Functional-Equivalence Bible Translation. Part 1″ (Notes on Translation Vol. 9 No. 1 (1995):16-36)