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        Writing/Language, (zaibatsu), 12/05/2018
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(In case anyone is averse, this post isn't about religion, 
it's about language and writing. I'm not a Bible expert, 
these are just thoughts on the construction of the thing.)

Took the kids to a parade in town the other day (a Christmas 
parade I think? Yeah, Santa was sitting on a fire truck...) 
During the parade people were throwing candy and passing out 
stuff. One fellow came up and handed me a little pocked New 
Testament from the Gideons[1]. Every time I think of the 
Gideons, I think of the bible villain in Mission Impossible. 
I almost handed it back- I have plenty of Bibles- but 
decided to keep it.

Flipping through the front matter while the marching bands 
walked past, I noticed that this little New Testament was 
the ESV translation[2]. I'm a KJV sort of guy for my reading 
in English. I like the archaic style, and it's the one they 
use at church. But, I have read the Louis Segond in 
French[3], and I have a couple other French ones from the 
Catholic Church that I flip through as well (The Bible of 
Jerusalem, and a little pocket NT, not sure about the 
translation, feels more modern.) To be honest, I've never 
bothered with the "newer" translations in English, but not 
because I have any animosity toward them[4].

I looked up some info on the ESV. There were some bible 
thumping types online howling about doctrinal problems, so I 
educated myself a bit on the textus receptus[4] vs. the 
Nestle-Aland[5]. This is basic stuff for a lot of folks, I 
think, but I just hadn't bothered with it. I got my two 
greek NT's down from the top shelf, and realized they were 
Nestle-Aland (with the Latin and Greek) and Nestle-Marshall 
(1964.) Now I wish I had the textus receptus interlinear 
with translation (since I don't know much greek.)

My opinion is that it can only enrich my understanding to 
read and compare translations of a book, so I decided to 
read the ESV. I'm in Mark, I'll finish it in a month or so, 
unless life gets the better of me.

Learning another language- and I'm not sure this is 
universally true, but I noted it learning French- you find 
that translation is often a matter of finding the right 
single word in the target language that best conveys the 
idea expressed by the source language. At times you 
encounter words that are complex enough that they don't 
translate into a single word in another language. I'm sure 
volumes have been written on the subject, and since they'd 
be more instructive than my musing anyway, I'll quote one 
such volume:

"Exact equivalence is of course impossible: no translator 
could provide a translation that was a perfect parallel to 
the source text, in such respects as rhythm, sound 
symbolism, puns, and cultural allusions. Such a parallel is 
not even possible when paraphrasing within a single 
language: there is always some loss of information."

That's from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David 
Crystal, an exceptional book (not sure about editions, mine 
is oldish from an information age standpoint.) It's logical, 
but with the Bible there's an interesting twist: some folks 
believe that the Bible was insulated from doctrinal 
translation errors because it was God's book.

I said up front that I wasn't going to talk about religion, 
so I should probably move on, but from a language/writing 
perspective this poses an interesting problem: what do you 
do when you encounter obvious translation problems in a book 
that isn't allowed to have them? And, is it good to disallow 
human error in *any* situations? Is it reasonable and 
viable?

All thoughts that i'll have to figure out some other time. 
For now, I'll just read this ESV through and see what I can 
see. So far, it's about the same.

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Gideons International
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/English Standard Version
[3] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Louis Segond
[4] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/King James Only movement
[5] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Textus Receptus
[6] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Novum Testamentum Graece