Adam Slipped His Wife a Fiver
March 5, 2006

The Touchstone editors have been batting around the idea of a forum or a symposium on Biblical translation. What do we make of the theory of "dynamic equivalence," and what exactly does that theory imply, linguistically and theologically? What is the difference between a slavishly literal translation that actually distorts the text, and a faithful translation that attempts to render to the letter what is the letter's, and to the metaphor what is the metaphor's, and, at all times, to God what is God's?

From my own point of view -- leaving aside the gnarly problems of theology -- the Biblical translator is in an enviable position. He doesn't have to translate metered verse into metered verse; it's almost always prose into prose, and the rest of the time it's unmetered Hebrew poetry into prose, rhythmically separated into clauses. He never has to rhyme (in fact, he'd better not fall into an unintended rhyme). He can adopt whole passages intact from previous translations and earn praise for it; there is no such thing here as plagiarism. He has 2000 years of tradition and hundreds of predecessors to guide him.

I don't have a fully fleshed out theory of translation. If I were pressed, I'd say that the virtue most required of a translator is a kind of reticence -- or you might call it a chaste restraint, or linguistic humility. The translator should repeat the words of John the Baptist: "He must increase, and I must decrease." That restraint will suggest that the translator ought rather to err on the side of literalness; he will sense how often there is something precious in the literal meaning of the text, and will not want to lose that, even when a figurative rendering seems clearer at first glance, and more natural for the receiving language. For strangeness too is a teacher. the rest-Excellent!