Quality of jw.org translation?

by Wonderment 27 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Sea Breeze

  Fred Franz only took one 2hr. survey course in koine greek (biblical greek) at the university of cincnnati . The other greek he studied was modern greek.
  

  Like Russel, he was a school drop out and self-taught for the most part.
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  Phizzy

  Yes FF was obviously competent on some level, but what that level was can only be guessed at ?
• 

  TonusOH

  Being surrounded by adoring yes-men probably didn't help.
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  Phizzy

  Sea Breeze, I found this on an old Thread, confirming what you say.

  " However, according to Mr. Franz’s college transcript, his major language studies were in classical Greek (21 semester hours), not Koine Greek in which the New Testament was written. The Greek Franz studied has different grammar and syntax from that of biblical Greek.

  At that time, there was only one course in biblical Greek even offered at the University of Cincinnati.

  According to the 1911 university catalog, page 119, that course was titled: “The New Testament – A course in grammar and translation.” Although Franz did take this class, this was not a full 3-hour college credit course. This was simply a survey course of New Testament Greek. Therefore it could legitimately be said that Franz never completed not even one typical college course in New Testament Greek. The one short course he did take was in a sense, well….anti-typical; if I may use a favorite phrase of his."

  Just as one example of where Franz was probably lacking, the N.T use of the word "Logos" is very different in the Christian use of it , to that in Classical Greek. Many other Greek words in the N.T have new or more nuanced meanings, of which fact Franz may well not have been aware.
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  Sea Breeze

  The one short course he did take was in a sense, well….anti-typical

  ; if I may use a favorite phrase of his.

  Phizzy:

  Made me laugh so hard went into a coughing fit.
  
  
• 

  slimboyfat

  Fred Franz only took one 2hr. survey course in koine greek (biblical greek) at the university of cincnnati . The other greek he studied was modern greek.

  Surely that is classical Greek, not modern Greek??? Two years classical Greek seems good training for understanding the NT. A number of scholars of classical Greek have produced acclaimed translations of the NT. Some might argue it’s a better way into the NT text than a specific course on NT Greek with all the theological bias that may entail.
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  NotFormer

  Franz's translations always struck me as the kind that would come from someone who was old-school trained in Classical Greek. His rigid adherence to translating Greek constructions into English being my main example.

  The NWT* loved the continuous tenses and rendered them slavishly in English. For example, where most modern translations would say "Seek the Kingdom of God", the NWT** would have "Keep seeking the Kingdom of God".

  Quite often a translator of a contemporary translation might translate the imperfect tense into a simple past tense rendering. The NWT would try to keep the tenses the same (and try to reflect the Greek "aspect"). So where a modern translation might simply say "went", the NWT would say "was going".

  So I have no doubt that Fred had some formal training in Classical Greek. But his translation is way more rigid than it needed to be, especially considering that Koine Greek is somewhat less formal in form.

  *I'm remembering things about the NWT that existed twenty or so years ago, not the current revision. I haven't had a good look at it.

  ** Doing this from memory. Judge the spirit not the letter, please! 😉
• 

  Anony Mous

  @slimboyfat: not nearly enough for actually understanding an old book like the Bible which the original text is often incomplete. I’ve done 1 year of Latin and 1 year of Russian, because the latter is a different alphabet, I know enough to know the alphabet, a basic level of grammatical and other structures and how to pronounce the words, a basic conversation (although if you don’t use it frequently, you forget it). But could I read War and Peace in the original language or Cicero, write a translation or thesis, know the meaning and the historical context, no, not even remotely. Most people here speak decent English, many people have taken English literature in college, but even Middle English you will have a hard time understanding and translating the works, especially incomplete ones without at least a PhD level (8 years of hard work) on the subject and even then, it takes a few years to be taken seriously in the field, to get to that level, we are talking 20-25 years of continuous education and immersion in not just the work but also the history, research, peer reviewed papers - there are people that spend their entire careers on a single book, you think WTBTS can just translate the entire Bible, independently, with a 2y starter course from a low grade University? It is obvious from any serious review of their translations that they borrow heavily from other translations and simply inject their own ideas outright.

  The WTBTS and many religious types over time, even some people here attempting to do some independent scholarship all suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you want to be taken seriously, there are plenty of places to get independent review from scholars in the field, yet every single one of them is afraid to openly publish as they aren’t going to be taken seriously.
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  Phizzy

  Thank you Anony Mous !

  excellent points, and what you say is the reason that the NWT is not taken seriously as a Version for reference by the Academics in the Field of Biblical Studies, although some have rightly praised certain verses for the way they are rendered, so Ol' Freddie did do quite well indeed, for an Armchair Scholar........... in places.
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  Anony Mous

  @Phizzy: it is interesting to look at the people that praise it vs those that criticize it. Either they are JWs themselves (at least 2 of them), most of them are evangelicals and some others with a specific religious bent. Theological, historical and critical reviews (the majority) all reject the translation. It is ‘a’ translation mostly borrowed from extant English translations.

  There is no evidence in my opinion that they actually re-translated from the original languages, which is why the translation feels so wooden (which is the most common critique), it pays no attention to the actual flow of the original language, especially the Hebrew scripture which was itself based on oral tradition and thus is poetic in nature. What I think happened is they took a few interlineair translations and tried to restructure that into an English text and then obviously layered on their own theology which is how you get that result, you lose the original meaning.

  This pattern is even more obvious when you look at Kingdom Interlinear, they quite literally copied W&H, changed the words wherever they needed to and then released that as their own. It is also obvious that whenever their teachings have changed over the years, they have released updated Bibles with those changes embedded which wouldn’t happen if you had an accurate translation to begin with, or if the claim is that they honestly re-translate every so often, then more would change than just a few passages.