Since I worked for many years as a French teacher, the subject of languages is one very dear to my heart and I have always been interested in Bible translation. As Stephen highlighted last night, it is not always easy to understand how or why certain phrases are translated as they are in our Bibles. Literal, word-for-word translations often don’t help us much in understanding what God is actually saying to us, because languages are constructed in different ways. Word order, verb endings, pronouns and all the other grammatical functions which help us to analyse and understand languages tend to vary from one language to the next and so it is important to be clear about these things when we are reading the different versions of the Bible available to us. There are a number of key things translators have to look for when translating: as the preface to the widely used New International Version of the Bible says, ‘The first concern of the translators has continued to be the accuracy of the translation and its faithfulness to the intended meaning of the biblical writers. This has moved the translators to go beyond a formal word-for-word rendering of the original texts. Because thought patterns and syntax differ from language to language, accurate communication of the meaning of the biblical authors demands constant regard for varied contextual uses of words and idioms and for frequent modifications in sentence structures.’
Organisations such as Bible Society and Wycliffe Bible Translators work tirelessly to translate the Bible into languages for people who have never had the privilege of reading God’s Word in their mother tongue. Wycliffe calculate that there are approximately 7 billion people alive today, speaking almost 7,000 languages. Almost 2,000 of these languages do not have the Bible yet, with only 513 language groups having access to the entire Bible in the language they understand best. Those of us who own many different versions of the Bible in English are privileged people who can study and learn from God’s Word in the privacy of our own homes as well as when we attend church. Those of us who have the honour of teaching God’s Word need to remember Paul’s injunction to Timothy: ‘ Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.’ (2 Tim 2:15) All of us need to be aware of how easily misunderstandings can occur as we seek to dig deep into a book whose context, history and culture have to be taken into account as we read. Nonetheless, this remains a living word (Heb 4:12) through which God speaks to us each day if we have ears to hear..