"The Authorized Version, in Hebrews Xiii. 4, gives you 'marriage is honorable in all'; it was an attack, Martin held, on celibacy, and it was bad scholarship. And, sure enough, the Revised Version and all modern Protestant editions give you 'Let marriage be held in honor' or words to that effect. Not so Gregory; he would not interpret, for fear of giving the Protestants license to interpret. His sentence runs, 'Marriage honorable in all and the bed undefiled', without any pretense of a main verb; grammar be hanged!" - "Challoner and the Douay Version" in
On Englishing the Bible 29
6 comments:
One of the many, many, places where the DR is more literal in translation, without attempt to interpret.
This is also one of the strengths of the KJV, and its use of italicized words showed when the translators made interpretive additions. I would rather see an NASB-CE than a ESV-CE, for this reason, also.
NASB-CE! Hear hear!
But if a translation is so literal that it results in English which is completely ungramatical andincoherent then that is not a good thing, and all too often, that's exactly what the DR does.....more the original 1609 version than the Challoner...but nevertheless...
Does this dynamic vs. formal equivalence in translation controversy exists for other texts too?, like novels for instance. Or is particular to Bible translation?.
Have you ever noticed how many translations there tend to be of popular works like the works of ancients like Homer and Virgil, the novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, or Dante, and even operas? Every few years, someone publishes a new translation of The Illiad and The Odyssey and reignites the old, brewing controversy over the proper way to translate Homer....and there's a huge controversy over the correct translation of the Diary of Anne Frank, and over the translation of the Three Penny Opera.....you might not know it, but a few years ago someone came up with an entirely new translation of the The Three Penny Opera and ignited a huge controversy over whether the traditional translation of the jazz standard 'Mack the Knife', recorded by artists such as Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, was at all accurate. The new translation uses much more explicit language and is much darker, ostensibly because the previous translation was sanitized.
The things I love about the NASB and the DR are the things that a lot of people hate. Very clunky and awkward English in a formal equivalence translation. After a few decades of listening to the audio Bible in various translations, I have a feel for what it says, and I don't need smoothed over English anymore. It's more fun to leave in all those sharp corners and odd phrases from another language and culture and historical period far removed from my own. I feel uncomfortable without them. Different strokes for different folks...
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