Translating God’s Word – “Essentially Literal Translations”
When considering translating from one language into another, the first translation theory to consider is “essentially literal”. I put this phrase in quotation marks because no translation can be “literal”. As noted in the previous post, each language has too many shades of meaning for each word to make any individual translation “literal”. However, some translations attempt to translate word by word, and even sometimes to mimic the structure of the original language as much as possible, and these are often referred to as “essentially literal” translations.
An “essentially literal” translation has been defined in this way: “An essentially literal translation translated the meaning of every word in the original language, understood correctly in context, into its nearest English equivalent, and attempts to express the result with ordinary English word order and style, as far as that is possible without distorting the meaning of the original…The main point is that essentially literal translations attempt to represent the meaning of every word in the original in some way or other in the resulting translation.” (Wayne Grudem, Translating Truth, 20.) For this reason, some people refer to these types of translations as “word for word” translations.
Among English Bibles, there are a number of well-known translations which more or less follow this theory. These include the King James Version, the New King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, and the English Standard Version.
There are two main advantages of this translation theory. First, these often do a better job of keeping the full meaning of a particular text – including any secondary nuances. For example, in Psalm 8 we read the question “what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?” (ESV). In the NIV2011 this has been translated as “what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” Notice that instead of an individual “him” we read of “them”, and instead of the “son of man” we read of “human beings”. While this certainly captures the care of God for humans in general, which is certainly key teaching of the Psalm, Jesus also uses the title “Son of Man” and this is even picked up by the writer of Hebrews (see Hebrews 2:5-9”. Thus, the “essentially literal” translation may preserve a secondary nuance that is lost by a more dynamic equivalent translation.
Second, “essentially literal” translations tend to give more consistent translations of Greek and Hebrew words, using the same English word more often. This may help a reader who is not familiar with Greek or Hebrew to see word connections that can be lost by other translation theories.
However, there are also two disadvantages to this translation theory. First, these tend to create translations that are more difficult to read, and in which the English is not as smooth or beautiful as the original text is in its own language. Furthermore, this also encourages words and metaphors that are unfamiliar to English readers in order to try and use stay as close as possible to the underlying metaphor in Greek or Hebrew.
Second, because these translations are more difficult to read, using more complex English words and structure in an attempt to stay close to the original, readers can sometimes actually be more prone to misunderstand the text. Thus, rather than helping the reader to really understand the original language text, they can cause misunderstanding if not read carefully!
As I close, let me state that these strengths and weaknesses are not meant to say this is the “correct” translation method. I am simply pointing out potential strengths and weaknesses, and this will be done for each translation method.
Next time we will look at what is known as the “dynamic equivalence” translation theory.
In Christ,
Bret