After the beating I’ve taken recently for advocating the CEV as an excellent translation of the Bible, I thought rather than wind up the same old rhetoric that I would poke around and look at some of the philosophies that underlie the CEV translation. It is probably a sign of my indoctrination in a Bible translation organization that I so admire what Barclay Newman and his team did. This method saturates my training. And it feels as if Martin Luther’s comments on the translation of the German Bible are a sort of sacred text to us translators. The essay by Ernst Wendland from which I regularly lift quotes by Luther is practically a magna carta for Bible translators working on translations into minority languages. His paper was delivered in 1994 in Lusaka, Zambia and then published in 1996 in Notes on Translation. Interestingly, Newman in the 1996 interview quotes Luther almost exactly the way Wendland did. Perhaps there is a Q source that both scholars were drawing from?
I invite you to glance through these quotes. Some of them are quite thought provoking. I especially enjoyed the PBS interview of four Bible translators.
Despite all my searching, I could not find any good information on Peter Waldo’s Bible translation into Provençal. All I could find was an undocumented quote attributed to Eugene Nida!
Here goes…
A strange assortment of quotes about Bible translation
“Englishmen learn Christ’s law best in English. Moses heard God’s law in his own tongue, so did Christ’s apostles.”
—John Wycliffe (c. 1330-84)
“Christ gave his gospel to the clergy and the learned doctors of the Church so that they might give it to the laity… Wycliffe, by thus translating the Bible, made it the property of the masses and common to all and more open to the laity, and even to women who were able to read… And so the pearl of the gospel is thrown before swine… The jewel of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity.”
—Henry Knighton, a contemporary of John Wycliffe.
“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.”
—Martin Luther on his German translation of Psalm 63:5
“We are now sweating over the translation of the prophets into German. O God, what great and hard toil it requires to compel the writers against their will to speak German. They do not want to give up their Hebrew and imitate the barbaric German. Just as though a nightingale should be compelled to imitate a cuckoo and give up her glorious melody, even though she hates a song in monotone.”
—Martin Luther, again.
“(Peter) Waldo, a business-man in Lyons, France, in about A.D. 1170 became intensely curious as to the content of the Scriptures. But he could not read Latin, and so the Scriptures were a closed book to him. However, he hired two money-minded priests, who, in violation of strict regulations, translated the Bible for him into Provençal, the language of southern France. The content of the Word of God made such an impression upon this earnest man that he gave up his business, took upon himself a vow of poverty, and dedicated himself to the simple preaching of the contents of God’s Word.”
—Eugene Nida speaking of Peter Waldo
“At the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth, when the heart was wild and waste, darkness over the face of the ocean, rushing spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
—Everett Fox’s translation of Genesis 1:1
“We take in consideration the fact that more people hear the scriptures read than read them for themselves, and we tried to create a text that a person who is unfamiliar with traditional biblical jargon can read aloud without stumbling, can hear without misunderstanding, and can listen to with appreciation and enjoyment because the language is lucid and lyrical.”
—Barclay Newman on the translation of the CEV
“Well, we did a lot of research with children. We did a lot of research with persons who were not familiar with traditional biblical jargon, persons who are almost street people as a matter of fact, and then we tried to simply listen to the way that people speak. As Luther said, we did not have to listen to the literal Latin to translate German, rather we listen to the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace. We got it by their language, the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly. That’s the kind of thing we tried to do.”
“Would that these were translated into each and every language… Would that the farmer might sing snatches of scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of scripture to the tune of his shuttle.”
—Desiderius Erasmus in his preface to the Greek New Testament
Notes:
The quotes of Luther come from “Martin Luther, The Father of Confessional, Functional-Equivalence Bible Translation. Part 1″ by Ernst R. Wendland in Notes on Translation Vol. 9 No. 1 (1995):16-36
All other quotes except those with hyperlinks come from “The Bible: A History” by Stephen M. Miller & Robert V. Huber, 2003.
I thought from the title you were taking the name of us Brits in vain again! But I’ll let you off as you were quoting Wycliffe, from the days before any Americans had stolen our language when English really was the property of Englishmen (and women, probably assumed included by Wycliffe).
Great poetry, but did Everett Fox really write “heart” in his translation, or did you make an unintentional anagram of “earth”?
>Peter,
The language thievery is barbarous! Think also of what Jesus’s disciples stole from Aristotle.
>Lingamish,
Yes, “rhetoric.” And your link does have “feminism” by some other unnamed name: Susan Thistlethwaite is saying “We also try to look at ways in which texts have been misunderstood or misused in order to, uh, do actual harm to people and to, umm, apparently exclude them from the realm of God.”
>Peter again,
So if David’s American “English” translates Luther’s German translation of the Hebrews’ Hebrew, then how would you Brits translate that?
I mean, what’s English for the Americanistic translation of what the Germans mean by this: “By ‘lard and fat’ the Hebrews mean joy”?
And what’s real English for that vulgar American rendering of Luther’s beautiful German commentary: “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.’”?
>David again,
Since no Englishman or American can understand these expressions. . . won’t you appreciate the beauty in Thistlethwaite’s original “uh” and “umm” (which no German can understand)?
That’s a cut and paste from the very shaky transcription. But I like it better than “earth.” Very poetic!
Our Father-Mother… yeek! Why not do it up right and make it Our Mother-Father?
Uh, umm.
David,
I am temporarily stunned into silence by your Peter Waldo quote. [Recovering.]
As for Luther, his comments on how translation needs to be done must be balanced by noting how he actually did translation. It turns out that Luther was not a DE translator in the mold of Barclay Newman. His translation technique is much closer to that of KJV in its day, RSV in its day, and REB in our day. If you think otherwise, please explain why.
On another note, since I haven’t said it for a long time, I will repeat it now. Good News for Modern Man, the mother of all DE translations, was the only translation I read the New Testament in, cover-to-cover, as a teenager. That’s because it is clear and easy to understand.
Once I began learning Hebrew and Greek, the limitations of TEV became clear to me, but then, the limitations of NASB, which many of friends at the time preferred, became even more palpable.
Knowing your strong feelings for both Waldo and Nida I put that one in especially for you.
Kurk, when you Americans stole our language you at least did us the complement of making only minor distortions to it. The result of that is that sometimes, as in the cases you mention, the “vulgar American rendering” is in fact a close approximation to the proper English. Anyway, who translated those Luther quotes into English, a Brit or an American – or the half-bred Lingamish himself?
I have been mercifully spared from German with the exception of “Gesundheit” when someone sneezes.
Any online sources for the source of the quotes I give above by DML?
How come the footnotes at the bottom of the pages in the NIV old testament agree with the King James, and not the NIV more often than not. When it is claimed that they are the most accurate interpetation, why does the NIV depart from the Dead Sea scrolls, Masoretic, etc.and the Authorized agree with them.
Why do the other modern bibles agree with the NIV, such as the NWT, Good News, RSV.
If the reason for new translations is greater accuracy, why aren’t they more accurate?
Is this deception, or ignorance? It seems that many people want to write a bible that accomodates the life they live. Jesus sent out his disciples, taking nothing for their journey.
The people they preached to, sold their possesions and gooods, and parted them to all men as they had need. In accordance with JESUS words whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath he cannot be my disciple. Go sell that thou hast, give to the poor lay up for thyself treasures in heaven. Take no thought for the morrow what ye shall eat….etc. Freely ye have recieved, freely give. If you have not been faithful in unrightous mammon who will commit to your trust the true riches?
Wisdom, instruction, and understanding. I hope you aren’t trying to translate from the “original Hebrew, or Greek” manuscripts.
Remember that ” the scripture preached before the gospel unto Abraham”. And ” the scripture was fullfilled when Abraham offered up Issac”.
It was Melchizedek the highest priest in The Bible, that brought Abraham bread (The Word, John 6). and wine.
When Jacob got to Bethel it was a city of Gentiles and the house of God. The children of Israel needed a gentile to “show them the entrance of the city”, they could n’t even do that till the book of Judges.
Jacob wrestled “a man” for a blessing.
“A man” sent Joseph to Egypt, via his brothers.
Joseph said it was GOD that sent him.
Moses “did obesience” to the priest of Midian, “he did all that he told him”. It was the priest of Midian, that told Moses to get the Commandments.
After they had the commandments, while THE LORD was in the cloud by day, and the fire, by night. Moses prayed for The Priest of Midian not to leave them, but “to be for eyes unto them in the wilderness”.
The J in Jesus comes from Japheth, the firstborn of Noah, from Jabal, “the father of all such as dwell in tents and keep cattle”, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and the patriarchs.
God had a covenant with “all flesh” and “every living creature”, the law was made for murderers, menstealers, and whoremongers”, “it was added because of transgressions”. not because of rightousness.
Not because they were closer to God, than the people that knew God first.
But, no doubt someone that is qualified to “write their own bible”, is not surprised by any of this.
Please, I exhort you to have charity towards the people that came before us. Let us “thinketh no evil’ of them. Let’s “believeth, all things, and hopeth, all things”.
Of all the things we have charity for, why not try to find it in our hearts to have it for the ones who gave their lives, to get us The Bible we have now.
Let’s try to find the strength to do what it say’s. So many of the prophesies are coming to pass, lt’s a bad time to sew confusion, for “the love of money”, or to “sit in high places”.
If thou art a judge of the law thou art not a doer of the law.