How Is a Bible Translated?

What does it take to get the Bible into English? When you hold that Bible in your hands and you’re turning the pages or you’re swiping the Bible that you’re dealing with on your device, what was behind getting it from the Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek language into a language that you can understand, and what are some of the challenges and decisions that go into creating an English translation of the Bible?

Well, that’s our topic for today and this episode of the Table features a panel discussion that took place at one of our chapels. We regularly have what are called cultural engagement chapels where we probe a given topic, interview people much like we do on the podcast, and students get to respond and ask questions at the same time.

And so this took place a few weeks ago here at the seminary with people involved with the New English Translation or the NET Bible for short, which comes with a series of notes that explain some of the translations. That’s what makes this particular Bible unique.

So you’re going to hear from several DTS professors who personally worked on the translation on the NET Bible and they’re experiencing creating this translation.

Every one of them has experienced working with other translations as well. So we talked about other translations at the same time and we discussed issues like how do you know which words to choose when you have options, all of which will work, or how literal should a translation be?

And there are even some humorous stories about funny things that happened in the midst of doing the translation and creating an English Bible that people can understand.

So we hope you’ll enjoy this special panel discussion and you’ll learn a lot about the Bible that’s in your hands and all the work, the hours of work that went in to making that translation so that you can read, study, and reflect on God’s word.

So obviously, we’re here to announce the soon publication, the eminent publication, not quite like the second coming of Christ, okay, of the NET Bible and so I wanna introduce panelists that I’ll be interviewing.

First, Nikki Getman who is Senior Marketing Director at Thomas Nelson and then Hall Harris, Senior Professor of New Testament Studies here at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Dorian Coover Cox, Professor of Old Testament studies, Robert Chisholm, Department Chair and Senior Professor of Old Testament studies, and then Dan — so you would have a choice – Dan Wallace, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies.

And these are all people who worked on the translation. We also have with us people who worked on this translation, and I’m not gonna call them out by name but if you worked on the NET translation and you are here, would you please stand? Go ahead.

Now translations are interesting things and sometimes they actually are controversial things. So the first thing I wanna do is I wanna ask Nikki, why was Thomas Nelson interested in publishing another Bible? After all, it isn’t like we don’t have all kinds of English Bibles out there.

So we have a long history and – with bible publishing but this one is different. The NET allows you, no matter which translation you’re reading to really understand why the translators all the way back through the centuries, are we okay down there?

It’s something that’s never been done and we are thrilled to be representing this Bible and doing this for the church.

Can you count up the number of hours that you have spent and you’re not getting paid by the hour, are you?

So anyway, too many moving parts [laughter] but I think the challenge was worth it because I’ve always believed that you can’t really have too much information about the Bible and what goes into the Bible and what’s behind the Bible.

We live in a culture that’s very different from First Century or even Second Millennium B.C. culture, and anything we can do to bridge that cultural gap, I think is helpful to the reading and understanding of scripture.

Otherwise, if we don’t look at it and understand it, first in its historical setting and context and then go on to ask the question how is that relevant for the church today, all we’re really doing is using a magical book of incantations.

We just flip it open, put down our finger and that’s our verse for the day. No, I don’t think so. We’re all better than that, especially at Dallas Seminary, for goodness sakes. So that’s my initial take.

And every translator has to make those decisions according to the target audience. So who’s gonna be reading this? Will they understand it well, if I say it this way versus that way, and in working with a committee on various choices, each person brings insight into that choice so that you’re working to get as much as possible, a close yet understandable presentation of what you know to be there in the source language.

And so any of you who are working between languages know that you can get information from one language into another. That’s not the problem. The problem is how much of the emotion comes through? How much of the wordplay comes through, and other similar things and what do you do with figures of speech that aren’t the same in both languages?

And so I don’t, any more really like the term literal because often it seems to me that what is offered as a literal translation is simply the first translation value in the dictionary for each word rather than anything that actually conveys the thought that’s there. So I don’t know. Does that help a little bit?

So to even have a chance to be involved in these two projects has been a great joy.

And so the notes, and one of the things that I did for portions NET Bible was to come along after the initial translation had been made and the initial notes had been offered and simply go through them and say okay, does this make sense to me? Is there a mistake of any sort here? Can this be improved?

Is the punctuation correct? That – there are – if a human being touches it, there could be a mistake.

You’ve got that there and then you can talk about options and many times, we would give other possible translations. If you went with Interpretation A, here’s the way you’d translate it.

Interpretation B, this is the way you’d go, but you have to choose one for the text. You can’t just put dot, dot, dot when you come to a difficult verse.

It was just my translation for the sake of the study, and I had several dot, dot, dot places because I wanna communicate nobody really knows what this is saying but – so yeah. That was the great thing about NET. It just freed you up to include all the options and yeah, I liked that.

What do you think people don’t appreciate about what happens when a translation gets produced?

It was – that was probably the biggest challenge to me is when you translate the text a certain way, you wanna get rid of what Lindgren calls the junior high snicker effect. You don’t wanna have something that sounds lewd.

So this discussion that we see generally in public about translations and whether they’re more literal or more dynamic is actually wrestling with a very real problem in translation, isn’t it?

Now one of the problems when you convert it, in so many of these idioms into modern English where you get rid of the figurative language is you also lose some of the powerful connotations as Dorian was suggesting, that we want the reader to feel the same way as the original readers did.

We had a field translator who wrote to us and he said when you translate ἐν Χριστῷ, in Christ, that doesn’t really communicate very much in English to the modern reader.

So you need to change it to something different every single time, and our response was well, it actually didn’t mean very much to the ancient Greek reader either.

It was – you don’t have the sense of people who are somehow in another person, who especially somebody who’s already dead.

So what does this mean? It means that he’s got the life that is the eschatological life that goes far beyond what we are experiencing now, and so what Paul comes up with when he invents that phrase is a metaphorical image that we have yet to plumb the depths of, and it’s something that we still have to wrestle with today.

So I think there’s places like that, that if it communicates the same to the English reader as it did to the Greek or the Hebrew reader, we wanna keep that.

So I’ve got my little iPhone here and those questions are popping up. So do feel free if you have a question to send those in. Go ahead, Bob, what were you gonna write?

Well, it’s something I pick up and throw at somebody? An obstacle in the way? I mean usage suggests that he has in mind a rocky cliff, terrain where he can go that will be relatively inaccessible and he’ll be safe.

So if you translate rock, you have no idea how a person is going to take that. So we decided to just go with protector because that’s the idea, because we’re not in a position to appreciate the metaphor.

Now shield, we were able to retain that one more literally because everybody knows what a shield is and what its function is, but with tsuwr, rock, we had to fudge and you do lose something. You lose the metaphor. You lose the power.

But one day he was working, he was translating and a passage in Proverbs on the wayward woman, and he got a phone call from his bank.

And he had one of those note things on his computer and he put the number down that he needed to call back to the bank and well, somehow, some way, it’s like stay away from the wayward woman there in Proverbs and then there’s a number in the footnote.

And so not only do the editorial committee look over something and wrestle with it from different perspectives but we also put that translation out there.

We did that before it was ever actually published, and Hall, I think you said we got over a million comments that came in?

Because this was originally an on-line bible, on-line that you didn’t have by the limits of a page, and what’s amazing about this particular version is that we’ve kind of done it in reverse.

We took the digital side of what was an open-ended possibility and have tried to move it into the confines of a set page, you know, with the lay-out.

Now when you see the result, its’s interesting because I’m reminded of texts of the Mishna and Talmud and that kind of thing that you often see where there’s a similar solution that actually looks so similar that we can say that even though this is new, it actually has quite an old tradition behind it.

It says English translations have been around for a long time. Only recently in my lifetime have there been notes to say that there are alternate readings of the verse.

The NET would seem to be an academic admission of humility. On the other hand, couldn’t a skeptic use it to argue see, nobody really knows what the Bible actually says anyway.

You can translate it any way you want. So that is a – Hall, your hand went right up.

Well, before the printing press, you couldn’t use just one. Manuscripts all differ, and so each Christian has a responsibility to know God as well as they can and with the NET Bible they have now an opportunity to compare that with their favorite translation and see why they think that’s really good.

And to me it seems like this is an analogous kind of question, and what’s the normal response to that kind of a question?

Among Greek New Testament manuscripts, there’s not a single viable variant that affects any cardinal doctrine and a number of scholars would say there’s not a single viable variant that affects any doctrine, whether it’s cardinal or even of minor significance.

Now later manuscripts have and fasting. The earlier ones have just prayer, but when I do exorcisms I kinda hedge my bet. I’m not sure which one it is.

So you – I just – I look around and I say well, if this is important, it’s going to be emphasized in more than one way and I can see it, if I look, if I’m watching it and so the – so the meaning is layered, I think.

You can see it being built and polished and built and polished so that there’s a strong sense of what’s going on and of what happened and where there – where Dr. Chisholm’s dot, dot, dot is concerned, he still knows what the book is saying.

Let me raise another question here. This is an interesting one. Do you have any expectations or is there any history? I’ll add to the question, regarding the impact of the NET to international translators and pastors.

I mean this is an English translation. It’s circulated digitally. It certainly has been read by people globally. Do we have any sense as to what the impact of the translation has been and could be in terms of international concerns?

And when a bible translator who is going into a new language, the task initially is to figure out, okay, what is this new language? How do I understand it and then how can I get scripture into this language.

And to have the notes from NET Bible explaining the options then makes it easier for them to ask questions of their informants, and to try different ways of saying it, so that they can get the aha moment where the informant says yeah, that’s what it is. That’s it, that’s it. I understand now.

And yes, I know translations of translations don’t do well but we’re looking primarily at the value of the notes to people in those other language groups and we’re also faced with a terribly daunting task of trying to render those notes culturally understandable to those other languages.

So if any of you out there come from different language backgrounds, and especially with translation experience, you should get in touch with us and let’s talk about even draft translations to help start would be useful, or reviewing other people’s translations would be useful.

So there’s plenty of room here for involvement on the part of any of you. I know some of you actually are in translation. I have some in my class this semester. So it’s just a quick footnote.

We think that giving that deep thought in terms of how the Bible is understood by people reading it who may not have a theological background is very important, and translation is a great bridge to get there.

So we should thank our panelists for taking the time to explain the NET Bible with us.