My brain is deep-fat-fried after checking the spelling on the Nyungwe translation of the Gospel of John. You can’t believe how many ways there are to spell Capernaum!
I also did a laborious read through the first six chapters in preparation for the translators’ visit next week. We hope to check ten chapters in four days. Why did John have to write such long chapters?!?
Seeing John 1:16 with the “grace upon grace” expression reminded me that someone had blogged on this phrase at Better Bibles Blog. After a bit of searching I discovered Grace for grace by Suzanne McCarthy on October 23, 2006. (She references a post on Sylvanus’ blog which appears to have since been deleted.) Suzanne says in her comments that ἀντὶ is ambiguous and that pretty much sums up the entire book of John.
[A little advice for those of you studying Greek. Yes, John is "easy" Greek but it is "tough" to interpret. And, don't lose too much sleep trying to decide how to translate ὁ λόγος. In fact, for most books of the Bible it's usually best to skip the introduction since this tends to be the most stylized and most difficult language.]
Suzanne has suddenly been posting a lot again after a recent hiatus. I like her posts on “Holy Spirit” and today she mentioned a metrical version of Psalm 91 that I’m going to see if Hilary will play for me.
It’s funny how Bible translation is a work that is continually changing. There are so many details to manage that you almost always find something you’d like to change. When Pastor Semo started looking at the first half of the Gospel of Mark he said, “You know we don’t really translate like that anymore.” This is a translation from only four years ago! Translators grow and mature.
Our family finally finished reading the book of Isaiah. It was our morning read-aloud after breakfast and it took a long time to get through it. Now we’ve started with Proverbs 10 and are enjoying reading these. Again, I’m glad we use the CEV for our Bible reading. It is easy-to-understand English. The kids laugh once in a while when they hear a phrase like “A beautiful woman who acts foolishly is like a gold ring on the snout of a pig.” (11:22) You’d be surprised how confusing a relatively idiomatic translation like NIV is to children who aren’t used to Biblish vocabulary. This sounds fine to me: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.” But there’s just enough weird syntax and difficult vocabulary in that verse to leave a native speaker feeling lost. And especially when you’re reading aloud it only takes a couple of phrases like that before the listener tunes out and is no longer comprehending.
Now, I wonder what will be the effect of reading the Nyungwe translation of John out loud. Should we just confess that John is rather mystical and heavily theological and that the average hearer will never be able to understand his words without guidance from a pastor? The Nyungwe translators are more conservative than I am. They’re very reluctant to stray too far from “the original” in this case the João Ferreira de Almeida which is the King James of the Portuguese-speaking world. And that’s probably just as well. A first Bible translation into a language tends to be very literal and only later as the church matures do the people begin to demand something with more natural sounding language.
Well, I hadn’t meant to write so much. I only wished to express my appreciation for Suzanne at Better Bibles and also say hello to my readers. I think I’ll publish this and go have another nap. I’m hoping my brain will recover from the last several days in time to be fresh when we start work on Monday.
