What does it mean to translate?

My wife spent time in Germany as an honors language scholar and the German I learned was for reading and not quite for speaking.  So when we would encounter Germans in New York City who were speaking in their native tongue, I would eagerly ask what they were saying.  Sometimes she would answer with the gist of it all and sometimes she would say that it was such an idiom that it could not be translated into English.  That would inevitably lead to my frustration as she laughed at their jokes or smiled bemused by their comments while I was left in the dark.

That is the problem with translation.  While we would like it to be rather mechanical and somewhat easy, it is not.  It is not possible to mechanically translate the words as they are on the page without occasionally and perhaps even often ending up with something that either does not make sense or does not have the sense of the original.  Literal translations are editorial every bit as much as dynamic translations simply because they require the reader to do what the translator did not.  So somebody must make an editorial decision about how to render the words from their original into the language you want them to be and that somebody is either the reader trying to make sense of a literal hodgepodge of word "translated" without communicating the idea or sense of what is there or the translator.  One of you will be doing that work so which one is better equipped?  The reader or the translator.  This is not only a matter of fidelity to the text but the work of rendering one language into another out of one culture and into another.

Translation is not a mechanical process; it is an art form.   It is often surprising to people that old and familiar sayings in English have heir source in Scripture.  That is often because the translator has rendered the words literally without communicating the idea.  Look up the phrase by the skin of my teeth.  It is from the Scriptures.  Job 19:20, to be exact.  One version says My flesh is corrupt under my skin, and my bones are held in my teeth.  That is misses the point.  Another says My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.  Google translator can render the words in English but it so often struggles to convey the text and idea in sensible English.

I must confess that I am in awe of the work of a good translator.  Note the singular there.  I am sad to report that too often translations are committee efforts and the committee actually votes on the one they like or chooses the one that they can all live with while the soul of the words is sometimes muted or made bland in an effort to be clearly understood.  While no one in their right mind would every say that Scripture is not clear or that it does not clearly communicate all that we need to be saved, that statement does not mean that we have no need for translators or that their work is ordinary.  Translation is also an art because it not only requires of the translator that they know two languages well -- the Biblical text and English.  That might be a common assumption but it is not a fact.  Not all translators know English well enough to aid their translations.  So let me express my appreciation to the good work of good translators.  They are doing a difficult job and one that requires an aptitude, skill, and knack -- over and above the knowledge of what the words mean.  This is surely why some translations endure and why some do not.