They Say God’s Inspired Words Can’t Be Translated and Still Be Go’s Inspifed Words
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The “Big Picture” behind all the Bible memes is CLEARLY explained in WHICH BIBLE WOULD JESUS USE? THE BIBLE VERSION CONTROVERSY EXPLAINED AND RESOLVED.
Paperback and Kindle: https://tinyurl.com/y3e5vcvg
BIBLE VERSION SECRETS EXPOSED— A collection of over 400 blockbuster editorial memes that present convincing evidence that there are errors of fact, history, geography and, science in modern Bible versions.
https://tinyurl.com/3hujf6dv
Bill TaylorIt is extremely difficult to translate from one human language to another because God did a super job of scrambling the languages at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). Even words for colors can be confusing. I told my mother-in-law that we’d painted the bathroom in our new house green. Next time she visited, my mother-in-law said, “You painted the bathroom again.” My wife said, “No, we painted it once.” My mother in law said, “Your husband said you painted it green but its blue.” She looked at me funny. I told her, “I’m not colorblind; I get the names mixed up.” She thought I was mentally defective.
My wife studied Japanese before we visited Japan where I’d lived. She said, “I understand blue and green!” Japanese use aoi for the color of grass and use the same word aoi for the color of the sky. I grew up using one word for both. It never occurred to me that getting English words mixed up was strange – my Japanese friends did it all the time, and Kentucky blue grass looks green to me.
How would a translator render aoi in English? Use blue if it’s about the sky and green if it’s about grass. The Japanese word “midori” describes the color of the grass but it’s seldom used. How would this sentence come out in Japanese? “The fireman was so green at his first fire that he was pretty blue afterward.”
Google Translate rendered it “Shōbō-shi (fireman) wa kare no (his) saisho (first) no kaji (fire) de totemo midori (green) dattanode (because he was), sonogo wa kanari (afterward quite) aoku (blue) narimashita (became).” It used “aoi” and “midori” as word-for-word translations of “blue” and “green.”
In this peculiar American usage, “green” means inexperienced or untrained and “blue” means depressed or unhappy. Japanese don’t use colors that way, so word-for-word translation gave nonsense. A better Japanese translation would be “Shōbō-shi wa kare no saisho no kaji de hijō ni keiken ga asakattanode (because he was inexperienced), kare wa zan’nendatta sonogo (disappointed).”
Should we translate “green” to a Japanese word meaning “untrained?” Should we translate “blue” to a Japanese word meaning “sad?” What about “frustrated?” Such distinctions require deep knowledge of both languages for a translation that captures the sense of the original.
Multiply this sort of ambiguity by hundreds and you get an idea of the difficulty of translating text. Poetry and puns are much harder. My classical scholar friends tell me that Homer’s “Odyssey” is riddled with Greek puns, but the only one anyone has been able to translate is “You’re odd, I see.”
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