How we can receive more from the Mass - 11 (Translating the Bible)

Languages and translation are more complex than we might imagine.

We all know how the English of Shakespeare, who was writing over 400 years ago, is so very different to the English that we use today.  Go back another 200 years to the second half of the 14^th Century, and the vast majority of us simply wouldn’t understand Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.

When abroad, have you ever seen signs that have been translated into English for the tourists, but done so poorly and maybe with unintended comical results?

Or try this: type an English sentence into an app to get a Spanish translation; then take that translation and translate it into German; and then take that translation and translate it back into English.  The likelihood is that you will not have the same sentence as you started with, and it may have turned out to be very different.

One more anecdote…modern Mexicans have a saying: “The donkey talking about ears.”  It’s a cultural idiom that makes little or no sense to us without explanation.

But Bible translators have much greater challenges than these.

The Gospels were written over 1,900 years ago.  But even these were translations; Jesus spoke in Aramaic but the Gospels were written in Greek.

Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, some of it in Greek – both languages were quite distinct then from their modern equivalents. 

The Book of Genesis was first written down about 1,400 BC, but had been passed down through an oral tradition for a great many generations before that.

And all these books of the Bible arose from worlds and cultures very alien to our own.

So spare a thought for those whose job is to translate the Bible into an English that is accessible to us today but faithful to the intention of the authors.