Reefton Jack said:
: I have never experienced any more difficulty in translating English into the Tok Pisin language, than I have experienced doing the reverse.
Well I think that just goes to show how much of an armchair scholar Freddie Franz was. You obviously have experience translating both ways because you have a real, working knowledge of both languages. Franz learned Hebrew from reference books, and that's a notoriously bad way of learning a language. Today we have a similar thing going on with many Japanese and Chinese nationals in certain technical fields. They often learn technical English which is rather different from spoken English, and so they're quite able to read and understand most written English, but are horribly difficult to understand when they try to speak, and almost hopeless in translating from Japanese or Chinese to English. For example, I worked for a total of about a year with a brilliant Chinese man from Beijing, doing electronic design. He could read technical papers without difficulty, and could understand spoken English fairly well, but it took a great deal of effort for any of his American coworkers to understand him, not only because of his extremely heavy accent, but because he was not able to phrase things properly.
: The 1954 Douglas Walsh case did, though, show FW Franz to be a novice - even a raw novice - in his knowledge of the Hebrew language. That does not exactly instill any confidence in the accuracy of the New World Translation
That may or may not be true. One must deal with many specific examples before one can generalize.
: - he was the only committee member to have any knowledge of the Hebrew language at all!
Right.
: (There is an expression where I come from, to the effect that "A little knowledge is dangerous." )
I think that was particularly true of C. T. Russell.
: When I first started studying with / being indoctrinated by the JWs, I was told that FW Franz was "The World's Foremost Scholar in Hebrew and Greek." Not knowing any better, I actually believed that at the time (Yeah, I know - silly bugger!)
Join the group. I was similarly indoctrinated about Franz when I was young. Only after I quit the cult and did some investigation did I learn that Franz was a brilliant but deranged man.
: As to instances where the NWT has mis-translated certain Hebrew words, I can't recall offhand exactly, but will do some research and locate these.
: . . .
: One such recent example of NWT error in translating from Hebrew is discussed in the post "Bible Translation" on 15 December 2005. (This mis-translation appears to be more than just doctrinal bias).
I take it you're talking about this thread from 14 December: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/103627/1.ashx
The only thing I see there is a few brief comments about the terms "ruach, spirit, active force". Is this what you have in mind?
AlanF
