Accurate Translations and Artistry in the Bible
Accurate Translations and Artistry in the Bible
If you've been in Bible translation for any length of time, friends, family, and others you meet will often ask you the all important question: "What is the most accurate Bible translation?"
Years ago, I could simply answer "the NASB" followed by the "ESV, NKJV" and then other "thought for thought" translations like the NIV and NLT.
Now, I feel that these answers are not only too simple, they are wrong.
Conversations about "accuracy" often revolve around individual words, which are just one of six or more aspects of meaning in communication. A "word-centered" approach to communication is a deceptively simple way to think and makes measuring the accuracy of a translation seem easy.
In reality, we always interpret individual words in light of (1) who is saying them, (2) at what occasion, (3) to whom, and in light of the (4) genre the speaker is using and (5) how formal or informal their speech is (called register). The "meaning" of the communication resides in how all these factors interact. Individual words are just one factor in the web of meaning we create every time we speak.
This richer view of communication takes us from seeing meaning as a simple web around individual words, like the one on the left, to a complex web involving many dimensions, like the one on the right.
Switching to another visual analogy, communication in any language is like a statue. Different angles capture different aspects of the statue, so no single 2D-image can accurately represent the whole statue. When "translating" the statue into a painting that people in another culture can see and appreciate, a painter has to choose the angle they think is most important and paint the best picture they can.
So, what aspect of the biblical texts should translators focus on?
A good question. Most translations clarify the factors above in small book introductions or study notes. In addition to those factors, though, one of the most effective ways is to have translations that capture the "artistry" of the Scriptures in their original languages.
What is artistry?
Let's return to the statue analogy above. Almost anyone can, with enough time and effort, chisel out something that looks roughly like a human. It takes an artisan, though, to turn cylinders into arms and legs, a sphere into a face, and ovals into life-like eyes. Those changes are subtle, but incredibly significant.
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the human authors of the Bible used many stylistic devices to "sharpen the texture of the text," as Ernst Wendland puts it (2004, 84). They used repetition, rhyme, alliteration, wordplays, and many other devices, to make the message of Scripture come alive.
The passages of Scripture present sharp images, such as this HD picture I took of myself:
During the translation process, some of these devices survive "shipping and handling" better than others. Often, translators have not been alerted to the areas they should "handle with care" because these aspects of artistry have not been foundational to discussions of doctrine.
Often, Bible translators are given a translation in a language which leaves them with about this much clarity regarding the artistry in the Scriptures. The translations clearly communicate the broad-strokes of the message, but do not capture the details that make it come to life. If they were a portrait, they would look something like this:
Now, the translators who are skilled verbal artists intuitively know that they need to make the message beautiful in their context for it to have the most impact. They usually end up filling in the details of the passage with their own cultural backgrounds. Their translation of the Scriptures may bear as much resemblance to the meaning of the Scriptures in the original languages as the AI pictures below (which I generated with Jasper AI) do to the original picture:
The pictures above get the broad strokes of the original portrait correct. They show pictures of a person, from the shoulders up, looking right at the camera. Most of them show men with short (or no) hair and have a light background. However, the pictures are also pretty far off from my portrait.
It would actually be hard—impossible, in fact—for someone who saw one of those pictures to recognize me in real life. In the same way, translations that miss the "artistry" of the Scriptures often make the main points of the passage harder to identify.
So, when translators are given tools to see the original artistry of the Scriptures clearly, they can produce better translations. When I gave Jasper the clear picture of me, rather than the fuzzy one, it produced a much better AI painting of me:
So, what's the most accurate Bible translation?
Here's my new answer: it completely depends on the aspect of the passage you are most interested in and how well a given version translates that aspect of the original language.
TL;DR
If the email was too long to read, here are the main points:
- Many people want to know what the most "accurate" translation is.
- Most conversations around "accuracy" revolve around how individual words are translated.
- Communication is more complex.
- Capturing aspects of artistry in communication makes translations more accurate.
Challenge for You
Want to find out more about artistry? Read my paper on it, or take a deep-dive by reading Ernst Wendland's book on Literary-Rhetorical translation.