Having completed my main review of the New Testament (and some Old Testament) texts, cataloguing almost 500 passages, I am "celebrating" that milestone by publishing a part of the paper that helps me in the weighing of these texts, which is currently entitled Chapter 2: Key Notions Defined. It is also an opportunity for me to tidy up these definitions. Here is the next one:
Translation
Translation is interpretation. If you already speak two
languages then you already know this, since there are so many words that you
have already seen cannot be systematically translated the same way, that
require context absolutely, etc. However, it can be, as Anthony Buzzard correctly
notes, a most subtle type of interpretation. Gordon Fee concurs: “it is
sufficient to point out how the fact
of translation in itself has already involved one in the task of
interpretation.”[1]
Buzzard
mentions its subtlety during a discussion of the significance of Jesus being
worshipped[2].
Imagine the following, slightly exaggerated, example: every time God is
worshipped (in Greek, Proskuneo), we get “worship”, every time Jesus is
worshipped, we get “worship”, every time a superior human other than Jesus is worshipped (in
Greek, still Proskuneo), we get “bowed down”, “prostrated”, etc. That would be a very subtle form of bias that begins before we even start to look at the
text, expressing an underlying theological commitment on the part of the
translator(s) of which most lay readers of the Scriptures have no awareness.
Fortunately, I think we can say that translators working in teams, even when
they might share some overarching theological perspectives, are steadily
removing some of these theological biases that have been historically present
in the translations we and our predecessors have been reading[3].
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