Most formally equivalent translations change the order and kinds of words that are used in order to help modern audiences understand the author’s original meaning. Using an interlinear translation, John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in Scripture, sounds like this: “Thus indeed loved God the world that the Son the only begotten he gave that everyone believing in him not should perish but might have life.”Īs you can see, interlinear translations sound stilted and can be confusing, because they take words that made sense in one language and transfer them into another language without considering that language’s grammar. The most formally equivalent translations of Scripture would be interlinear Bibles that replace the original words in the biblical text with their modern counterparts. One approach they use is called formal equivalence, and it strives to communicate the original words the author used. Translators have differing opinions about how words and phrases in a text should be reproduced into another language that has different vocabulary, different rules of grammar, and embodies different cultural attitudes than the language of the text they’re translating. How can this be? The art of translation is not as simple as taking a word in one language and then using a dictionary to find the equivalent word in another language. It’s important to remember that there is only one version of the Bible, but there are many different translations of it. Today, the entire Bible has been translated into more than 500 languages, and most languages offer several different translations. More than 1,500 years earlier, the New Testament was written in ancient Greek and long before that the Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, along with some Aramaic and Greek (the Old Testament was later translated into the Greek Septuagint).Īs time went on, all these texts were translated into Latin, which is the official language of the Church, as well as popular languages like German, French, and English. But the Bible was not written in seventeenth-century Old English. Some people mistakenly think the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), with its eloquent thee’s and thou’s, is the original version.
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