Further to Leo's post, I can attest the missing brackets in the Bulgarian translation...
New World Translation into other languages; anyone knows of any critics?
by dgp 32 Replies latest watchtower bible
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punkofnice
GaryNeal got that in before I did. That YouTube vid is priceless..............proof positive the JW's are not the one true religion. How happyfying to we oldsters!
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dgp
Thanks a bunch, Leolaia, for that wonderful link! It answers many of the questions I had.
I added a comment to that thread, but I'm posting it here as well, in the hope it will revive interest in this subject. I added a few things by way of explanation.
In my humble opinion, Mr. Émile Müller beat the Watchtower at its own game. Three million cheers to him for that.
He wrote "La Parole était dieu", meaning "the word was God", instead of "La Parole était un dieu", the word was a god. His reasoning was that in French you don't say "I am a doctor", but "Je suis médecin". That is, there is no indefinite article. The Watchtower accepted that.
Yes, "I am a doctor" is correctly translated as "Je suis médecin", but that is not the case with the word God. "était un dieu" is not the same as "était dieu", even if "dieu" is not capitalized. I invite anyone to try. Google "était dieu" and then "était un dieu", and you'll get very different meanings.
For example, I just googled the words "était un dieu", and one of the results I came upon was "quand l'empereur était un dieu", a book by Ms. Julie Otsuka. Those words mean "when the emperor was a god", and they were made in reference to the emperor of Japan, who, as we know, was was deemed to be one god, one among many; and every new emperor was another god. If "était un dieu" meant the same as "était dieu", then why is it that the writer used the definite article "un"? The writer, obviously, couldn't hold that every Japanese emperor was one and the same god, but only one of them.
What if the statement were "quand l'empereur était dieu"? Then the translation would be "When the emperor was god". You can argue that this final statement might be understood to mean that the emperor was one of many gods, not the only one, but that is not in line with the general spirit of the French language.
I think Mr. Müller was an honest man above all.
I wonder if modern versions of the French NWT include the "un dieu". That would be very revealing.
I am interested in determining whether translations from the English NWT into other languages were made simply from English.
In this regard, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic I would call "the source language". I know those are three languages, but please bear with me. Then I would call English "the intermediate language" and the final translation "the target language". It would be easier to show this as a flowchart, but I don't know how to do that here.
Well, any translator will tell you that translating from one language into another and then into another is just not the right thing to do. Anyone can give it a try: Use Google, and translate a paragraph into any one language, and then backtranslate into English: you'll see that the results are not the same. This kind of relay does not make sense.
The link Leolaia was so kind to provide proves that the competent hands of a good French translator were tied by the need to use the English translation as a reference. What we're saying is that the Bible translations most Jehovah's witnesses use were simply not made the way they should have been. If there are any errors in the English version, those are reproduced, and perhaps compounded, in languages other than English. It would be interesting to check this.
Also, I would question the statement that appears on NWT Bibles in languages other than English. They claim they translated from English, but checking the source languages. How can anyone do that? Only if the translator is good in English, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and the target language. And, if you're proficient enough to compare Greek to, say, Spanish, why the hell would you not translate from Greek right into Spanish?
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Roski
Rice is a synonym for food.
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possible-san
dgp.
Perhaps this is the wrong place to post such a question, but, is anyone aware of any criticism of the New World Translation as rendered into other languages, say, Spanish, Portuguese, French?
In other threads, there were questions which resembled this.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/205307/1/NWT-Foreword-in-other-languagesBut I have ignored them purposely.
It is because you and other persons are asking about other languages, not about Japanese.Probably, unless you stick to such a part, there may be no reply.
possible
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dgp
Well, thank you for pointing this out, Possible-san . It was not my purpose to ignore you.
What about Japanese?
Leolaia, won't you please check that source of yours. Bread is not that expensive in Latin America. It usually coexists with tortillas, and it is a staple of the people's diet. I don't know about others, but people would find it very odd, as in "unbiblical", if your translation of the Bible had Jesus eating corn. Latin Americans know for a fact that there was no corn in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus birth.
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Leolaia
Well, any translator will tell you that translating from one language into another and then into another is just not the right thing to do.
One can see this process at work in the Ethiopic version of 1 Enoch, which was translated from a Greek translation of the Aramaic original(s). One can quite easily see how the sense of the text has drifted through translation.
There are many ambiguities in English that are not present in the original languages. A person translating from English into another language would have to check with the original language to see which reading is the correct one. For example, Revelation 5:10 in the NWT renders Greek epi as "over" in a genitive of subordination: "They are to rule as kings over the earth". There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this translation, although it is not the only possible reading ("on the earth" is also possible, even likely). But English is ambiguous in a way that the Greek is not. "Over" can indicate a spatial location ("The Space Shuttle was orbiting over Africa when it began its descent") and a non-spatial relation of power ("The king ruled over his subjects"). Epi does not indicate a spatial relation of "over" (its spatial relation is "on" or "upon"), the proper word for that is huper. So what happens when a person wants to render the English text into a language that, like Greek, uses a different word to indicate a relation of power? The translator would have to check with the Greek to be sure. This is especially because the spatial reading may be selectively preferred in light of Jehovah's Witness doctrine about the 144,000; the translator may easily misread Revelation 5:10 as stating that the location of the anointed rulers is in heaven, and thus the doctrine about the 144,000 may bias the translator towards the incorrect reading. And indeed, this misreading of the text can be found in the official publications (cf. 1 March 1978 Watchtower, p. 21; 15 August 2006 Watchtower, pp. 6-7; the 1 December 1974 Watchtower, pp. 735-736 in contrast states that "over" in the NWT rendering does not "indicate the location of the rulers" but rather expresses the dominion exercised by the rulers), so this makes a mistranslation all the more likely. So a better translation which avoids this confusion is "They will rule the earth as kings" instead of "They will rule as kings over the earth".
This passage may actually be an interesting test case to see if in fact secondary translators stray from the sense of subordination that justifies the English NWT's rendering as "over" in languages where the spatial preposition lacks this function.
possible-san.....Does the Japanese NWT use ue "above, over, on top of" (or a similar word) in Revelation 5:10, or does it instead say something like "They will rule the earth as kings"?
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Leolaia
dgp....As I recall (and this is going back many years), it was in a 1950s or 1960s article in a journal devoted to Bible translation. Actually I'm not sure if the translation I'm thinking of was in Spanish; it may have been a Mesoamerican language. But the article mentioned that as an example of choices made in translation (such as by missionaries) necessitated by the cultural context, with "bread" being less suitable than "tortilla" on account of the status of corn tortilla in the community vis-a-vis bread.
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MeanMrMustard
@dgp:
I wonder why it is that there is a need to "translate" the New Testament (OK, the Greek Scriptures) into Greek, since it was written in Greek.
I believe it is because Biblical Greek (the Koine/common Greek of the Biblical age) is significantly different than modern Greek. Same with Hebrew. The modern Hebrew language is significantly different than Biblical Hebrew.
MeanMrMustard
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dgp
Point taken, Mr. Mustard.
Leolaia, THAT, using the tortilla reference for an Indigenous language, is possible. Missionaries may certainly do that kind of a thing. It would very much backfire among speakers of Spanish or Portuguese.
This comment of mine is not aimed at Leolaia or anyone in particular, but, since we're talking about Bible translations and contexts, this thing about the tortilla made me remember the story where a Spanish conquistador runs into a group of Mayan indians, who are keen on killing the invader. He warns the Mayans that, if they kill him, the skies will go dark in the daytime; and they kill him anyways, all the while telling him the many dates they had already predicted eclipses, plus the dates in the future when new eclipses would happen again. My point is, perhaps the missionary in question thought he had made a clever adaptation, and in their inner selves the flock thought that was just a joke, but the funny whitey over there still had managed to make his, ha ha ha, point.
It seems to me that this has been discussed before, but, hey, I'm the worldly. My impression is that the New World Translation is not an attempt at Biblical accuracy. That is secondary for the Watchtower after all. I understand they used other translations of the Bible until they had the NWT. Back then, it must have been embarrassing to tell the flock that "the word was a god", for example, when the printed Bible read "the Word was God". The Watchtower needed its own Bible, and produced it.
Then they had to translate it into other languages, but there weren't enough qualified brothers and sisters, so they produced whatever came out of the print shop, provided it contained the basic points they needed their Bible to prove. Nuances and the like could be lost anyways, since truthfulness was not the purpose the Bible would serve; it was all about control. And, voilá, they had the Word of God. Sorry, Jehovah.
The brothers and sisters would buy it and use it, anyways. Newcomers would be told that "other" Bibles were not right, and, ignorant as they would be of all the studies and the hard work that go into producing a good translation of the Bible, and perhaps ignorant of what the fuss is all about anyways (As in, for example, "Why do they keep calling god the Word?"), they would take the NWT as better than any other.
It doesnt' really matter to the Watchtower if true scholars or people with open eyes question that translation; what matters is that the flock doesn't, and, in that sense, the NWT does what it was meant to do.
If these translations were a temporary thing, the Watchtower would have rushed to have many brothers and sisters around the world to study solid Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, and would have produced serious translations, open to anyone for questioning. But that is not a priority. It's a curious thing that they usually do a very good job at translating the magazines. If you take an old Watchtower and compare it to a newer translation, you'll see there's obvious improvement. Because translating the magazines is what matters.