Odds and Ends
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posted by Wayne Leman at 6:48 AM
2 Comments:
What is one of the secrets to having better quality wordings in any Bible translation?
Revise, revise, revise!
And then when you are tired of revising, set the translation aside for awhile.
When you come back to it later, guess what--revise some more :-)
It also helps to read a translation out loud within a group, such as the translation committee. Something special happens when we read things aloud. We are able to pick up oddities in wordings which our eyes pass over if we just read to ourselves.
Finally, test all things! Read the translation to someone who is not familiar with church language and the Bible. Ask them to stop you whenever you read anything which doesn't sound like good English to them.
These days it is easy to get input from many people via the Internet. Post your English translation on the Internet and have some form to make it easy for people to note problems they sense in the wordings. You will sometimes be fortunate to have people read your translation on the Internet who have a good sense of what quality English is and they can spot problem wordings and tell you about them.
Job 41:28 None of the English versions I checked translate the Hebrew idiom of this verse literally. The idiom is "son of the bow" which is translated accurately in all versions that I checked as "arrow" or "arrows."
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