“English readers are blessed when it comes to Bible translations.”
This statement on its own could mean several different things. It could mean that Bibles translated into English are better than those translated into other languages. Another possible meaning could be that English as a language is more qualified than other languages to express the meaning of the Bible. Or it might mean that there are a lot more translations in English than in any other language.
It might be disappointing for some to hear it, but the first and second explanations are simply not true. There are excellent English translations of the Bible, and there are excellent translations in other languages. English is equally equipped to translate the original languages — and equally limited in finding just the right words — as other languages around the world.
The third explanation is true, though. No language has produced as many different translations of the Christian scriptures as English. Bible Gateway has dozens of the most popular English versions — and even that barely scratches the surface of the 900 or so partial or complete English translations.
In addition to this embarrassment of riches, yet another resource for readers of English ties in with the first and second reasons to emphasize how our cup overflows.
Pentecost for the Information Age
Several years ago, United Bible Societies (the umbrella organization that national and regional Bible societies, including the American Bible Society, belong to) started a project to collect and publish remarkable snippets of scriptural translations in all of the approximately 3,500 languages into which they have been translated.
Today, this ongoing collection is available in an online tool called Translation Insights and Perspectives (TIPs) that gives English speakers a window into Bible translations in hundreds of languages other than English.
Using the practice of “back translation” — taking translations of the Bible in various languages and translating those into English — TIPs invites us to experience the full breadth of ingenuity represented in the whole range of human languages as they express God’s truth. It’s the closest most of us might come to the experience of Pentecost, speaking and understanding languages we’ve never even heard of before.
Layers of Meaning in Four Biblical Terms
Here are four examples of the ingenuity of TIPs to demonstrate what sort of insights we can gain from it in our Bible studies: the words love, barley bread, John the Baptist, and hope.
Love
There are many entries within TIPs about how to translate “love” — or more accurately, the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek original terms that in English are translated as “love.”
You may have heard sermons explaining the different Greek words for “love” (agápē, philia, etc.) that are usually translated with a single hard-working English term. This is an example of how one language — in this case, English — can struggle to adequately communicate complex concepts in translation.
In most English translations of the important conversation between Jesus and Peter in John 21:15-17, Jesus asks Peter three times whether Peter loves him, and Peter answers three times that he does indeed love him. Crucially, however, the first two times Jesus asks Peter whether he loves him, he uses the Greek verb form agapaō. The third time Jesus asks (and every time Peter answers), the Greek text uses the verb form phileō, which is sometimes described as “brotherly love” and may be a more “human” kind of love than agapaō.
Other languages, including German, French, Burmese, and Kayaw (another language spoken in Burma), translate agapaō with their regular word for “love.” For phileō, where our English vocabulary does not have a natural equivalent that would fit into the direct speech of this exchange, these languages use a natural-sounding form of “to be very, very fond of.”
Is this important? I will leave that for you to ponder, but we can certainly agree that we want to get as close as possible to what God communicates to us through the scriptures — and this is an opportunity to move just a little bit closer. (You can read about the many nuances of this passage in more detail in the TIPs tool.)
Barley Bread
Another example of translation ingenuity showcases not the richer vocabulary of another language but a more restricted one.
In John’s Gospel narrative of the feeding of the 5,000, the English text describes the source of the food as a boy with five barley loaves, which is a fairly straightforward and natural-sounding translation of the Greek. Without a good Study Bible or commentary at hand, though, you might not immediately realize that “barley bread” was the cheapest kind of bread available at the time, emphasizing the desperate frugality of the situation that the disciples confronted.
Barley is not known in the East African nation of Malawi, so there was no readily understandable word in Elhomwe, a language spoken by two million people in the country. So rather than adding a loanword or explaining what barley is in a comment, the translator there just used “cheap bread.” This communicated exactly what was important to the Elhomwe readers — and today, maybe to us as well.
John the Baptist
You might be surprised to find a proper name among terms that need translation. In most spoken and written languages it doesn’t, though it might be transcribed differently or rendered with different writing systems (as you can see in the astonishing array of ways to write the name of Jesus).
But languages that are neither spoken nor written, such as sign languages for the Deaf, often use meaning-based translations for proper names, especially names for people who play an important role in the biblical narrative. The question is what meaning should be attached to the name — and therefore communicated every time the name is mentioned. Considering that there are more than 400 officially recognized sign languages worldwide, many of which are working on Bible translation, it’s clear that there will be a large variation in the emphasis different sign language communities put on a single aspect of any person.
For John the Baptist, most sign languages emphasize the baptism that John performed in the Jordan River by enacting the dunking of a body in the water, such as in Spanish and Mexican Sign Languages. Some sign languages — or some groups within sign language communities — don’t feel comfortable with the immersion implications of that sign; for example, the Catholic version of the German Sign Language sign for John instead shows the sprinkling of water on the head.
The American Sign Language (ASL) version of John identifies another aspect of John as the most significant marker for who he was: the announcer. In ASL, the signer signs the sign for “shout” (plus the letter “J”). Similarly, in French Sign Language, the sign that is used signifies “preparing the way” (cf. Mt 3:3, Mk 1:3, Lk 3:4).
Maybe most unexpectedly — yet beautifully — Vietnamese Sign Language denotes “John the Baptist” by showing an embryo leaping in the womb, recalling the prophetic encounter between John’s mother Elizabeth and Mary, both pregnant with babies foretold by angels.
All of these are important aspects of Jesus’ cousin, and we — whether we are hearing or not — can benefit from a reminder of this significance every time John the Baptist is mentioned in a verse in the New Testament. Similar information is available for all major Bible characters within TIPs.
Hope
“Hope” is an English word with a broad range of meanings, from a wish that something will happen (“I hope it’s not going to rain tomorrow”) to a spiritual certainty (“And we boast in the hope of the glory of God”). Mature Christians might have no problem with that second variety of meaning, but it might be confusing to young Christians or certainly to people who are not familiar with Christianity at all.
Exploring how other languages translate the term reveals that some also struggle to bridge different meanings. Spanish, for instance, uses esperar, which means both “to wait” and “to hope.”
Others have a much clearer delineation between the spiritual meaning and the everyday reality. In Yucateco, for instance, a Mayan language mostly spoken in Mexico, the biblical “hope” is translated with the phrase “on what it hangs.” “Our hope in God,” therefore, means that “we hang onto God.” The object of hope is the support of one’s expectant waiting.
In Ngäbere, a language spoken in Costa Rica and Panama, the phrase “resting the mind” — that is, “we rest our mind on the glory of God” — also implies a deep sense of “confident waiting.”
Perhaps most vividly, Anjam, a language spoken by just 2,000 people in Papua New-Guinea, seems to describe the certain embrace of a spiritual reality by using “looking through the horizon.” This implies that hope is nothing that can be perceived with our five senses, and yet it can clearly be captured by the mind of the faithful.
With hope and most other major biblical terms, TIPs offers a variety of ways to view the many different translations for a single term. You can view them in detail on the term’s page or via a link in that page to a concise graphical format like this:
Blessed by Bible Translations
English is a beautiful and highly expressive language that can unlock the meaning and even much of the poetry of the original languages in the Bible.
But so can other languages. Let’s celebrate the privilege we have of exploring that deep treasure chest by holding up any verse in the Bible to the light and seeing its beauty shimmer in manifold color (and translation).
I hope to see you over at TIPs.
Jost Zetzsche is a translator and the curator of Translation Insights & Perspectives (tips.translation.bible) for the United Bible Societies. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and MultiLingual.
