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Not all Problems Need Solving

The good thing about working as an exegete and translation adviser with translators is that you don't have to solve all the exegetical problems:

  • Numbers in the Old Testament
  • Whether manna was light blue or a kind of whitish colour
  • Who wrote the books of the Bible
  • Whether or not there were different 'sources' of a given book
  • etc.
We simply translate what is there and leave others to sort the problems out 😄. But, and it is a big but, there are problems we do need to solve:
  • What 'righteousness' means in the Old Testament, and in Romans/Galatians (actually it's more about how the respective Hebrew and Greek terms sadaqah and dikaiosune are used)
  • What does 'the righteousness of God' mean? Is it God's righteousness (as in his honour), or the moral righteousness i.e. innocence he imparts to us?
  • What does 'lord' mean when it refers to Jesus in any given instance? LORD God? Or lord/sir?
  • Why was a given verse/passage/book written? What was its purpose?
  • Is it ok to change direct speech (in quotes) to indirect, or vice versa? What effect might that have on the impact of the translation?
Only when we've solved the latter kind of problems can we translate a given text. 

So, to summarise, the good news is that some of the thorny issues people discuss are not relevant to us in translation. The bad news is there are plenty of even thornier ones out there for us to think about 😧 ...
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  1. Unknown7 November 2018 at 02:46

    Points well taken. When we translated the book of Revelation, I felt a similar thankfulness that it was not my task to explain what all the metaphors and descriptions of future events meant.

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