Category Archives: language

In the midst of all the recent discussion of varying “translation philosophies,” I came across an article by Karen H. Jobes on bilingual quotation (like what they do at the UN). The article itself is very interesting. Toward the end there is a discussion on verbosity in Bible translation. The bottom line is that a certain popular translation is more verbose than another certain popular translation. Jobes insists she is not trying to say anything bad about the first or good about the second, just that word counts are not necessarily a good indicator for the “literalness” of translation. I agree on the latter point. Thomas did an interesting workup to show how verbosity correlates to the spectrum of translations. The bottom line: it doesn’t, just as Jobes said. More “dynamic” approaches can lead to more or fewer words, it seems. Perhaps the whole point is moot, because I don’t know of anyone who counts isomorphism as a positive characteristic in translations

All of the principle translations of the Bible into English are done by translation committees. There are some notable exceptions, of course, including the Message, the Living Bible, Weymouth, Philips, etc. However, these are considered secondary due to their being completed by an individual. Moreover, I have sensed a general sentiment that such translations by individuals are not considered as trustworthy as committee translations because it is thought that personal bias would be allowed to shine through in an individual’s work. A committee is also useful for imposing a standard style on a work which is actually composed by many different scholars. I am sure there are more reasons for the committee trend. What I began noticing in college is that committee translations are pretty rare outside of the Bible (I cannot think of one off the top of my head). Instead, translations are typically done by an individual or small team. This is the case for works of antiquity, textbooks, novels, etc. Why is it that committees are so common for biblical translation but so uncommon for everything else? Is the quality of the end product affected by the decision to use a committee or not?