Perspectives in Translation

Question: What makes a translation accurate?

I have heard many perspectives on this question from people who were critiquing the HCSB or another translation. One view is that accuracy depends on how close a translation is to the KJV or how faithfully it followed a particular textual tradition (e.g., the Byzantine or the Majority text). I’ll pass on responding to that view here. Perhaps a more common view is that accuracy is defined as a high degree of literalness. I am more comfortable with this view, but I think it’s much too narrow. Attention to literalness is a factor in translation accuracy, I think, because a good writer’s choice of paragraph structure (e.g., whether the main point is at the beginning or the end), sentence structure (e.g., the use of dependent and/or independent clauses), word order, grammatical categories (e.g., verb or noun, finite or non-finite verb), or word choice (e.g., whether to repeat a word or root or to use a synonym) is not arbitrary. We should assume a writer had reasons for the words he (or she) used, even when it’s difficult to discover them. Sometimes the grammar of a language—whether Hebrew, Greek, or English—dictates such choices, and sometimes the author may be conveying subtle shades of meaning or aiming at a particular effect by the grammar he chooses. A Bible translation that does not work at squeezing as much of the author’s intentions as possible from the words that he used is leaving some of the divinely inspired message on the table.

Some translations and paraphrases intended for novice readers may legitimately choose to focus on the meaning most clearly and easily accessible from the text and avoid certain nuances that might be distracting. But a full-fledged Bible translation suitable for study cannot do so. On the other hand, a translation is not accurate if its meaning is obscure or unclear, which is often the result of aiming solely at literalness. Writers sometimes use puns and aim at multiple meanings. But serious writing tends to be frugal with such things, and for the most part the biblical writers were pretty serious about conveying a particular meaning and affecting their readers in particular ways. They weren’t just playing games. So a Bible translator (and team of translators) has to work skillfully and diligently with a full tool chest of the best tools available to arrive at not only the author’s intended meaning but also the best way to convey that meaning with complete clarity to the translation’s readers. And the latter goal is best achieved if the translation uses the idiom most easily understood by the readers. The grammatical purist who insists on following nineteenth century (or 1950s) rules of English is working against the goal of accuracy.

E. Ray Clendenen is Bible commentary editor for B&H Publishing and associate editor of the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

This entry was posted by E. Ray Clendenen and is filed under Translation Philosophy.