Bible Translation

Other Translations of the Bible

Some people think that having several translations of the Bible is a bad thing. They believe that it somehow confuses what the Word of God originally said. That is not true, according to the preservation of the original text.

A translation is just taking something written in one language and converting it so that it is understood another language. Regarding the Bible, it is taking the Hebrew and Greek and Greek manuscripts and translating them into the English language.

More thought and work goes into making a translation than we think. English is a complex language with many idioms and slang words. One example is the African American community. The African American urban community has different dialects based

Therefore, some translations will do a thought-for-thought transliteration into the idea of English, not the words. In this case, some of the technical details will be sacrificed for a clearer understanding of the original text. Others, however, may do a more literal translation and the meaning may be lost unless you are familiar with the cultural specifics of certain phrases. Various translations fall along this later spectrum, going from wooden literal translations to paraphrasing.

Let us use Romans 12:20 as an example of how the different translations philosophies work. The New American Standard Bible (NASB) is considered a literal English translation. They translate the previous text, “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” This is a close word for word translation; however, does that really help you understand what the author is saying? What does the phrase “heap burning coals on his head”

The Wycliffe Bible Translators translate the Bible into various languages around the world. I once heard one of their translators explain how he learned the language of a remote village in a remote part of the world and then translated from the language he learned.

In Matthew 28:3, where Mary Magdalene sees the angel at the tomb of Jesus, Matthew describes the angel’s clothes as “white as snow.’ ” The problem is that the village mentioned had never heard of nor seen snow, nor did they have a word for snow in their language. To communicate the meaning of this passage in their tongue, the translator translated this passage “white as coconut meat.” The indigenous people could relate to coconut meat, thereby understanding the meaning of the text.

There are currently dozens of English translations with more being written all of the time. Picking a version is largely a matter of personal preference. While the King James Version has stood the test of time, it can be difficult to understand since it is written in seventeenth-century