translation checking

Every Bible translation (or translation of any text, for that matter) should be carefully checked before it is published. Checking should take place regardless of the exegetical expertise of its translators or whether the translation is being done for a major national language, such as French, Swahili, Mandarin, English, or Hindi, or for a previously bibleless people group.

Translation checking should involve careful examination of at least two parameters:

1. Accuracy
2. Naturalness

Even if a team of highly trained exegetes, such as biblical scholars with doctorates in biblical languages and exegesis, has produced a translation, that translation should still receive an exegetical check by some group of well-trained exegetes who did not participate in the translation itself. Such independence helps create objectivity for an exegetical check.

A critically important aspect of translation checking which has often not been done for national language translations (such as English) is checking for linguistic naturalness. Here it is absolutely essential that a team of highly qualified native speakers/writers of the language, independent of the original translation team, perform a check for lingustic naturalness of every sentence in the translation. These individuals should be recognized by their speech community as outstanding in terms of their ability to spot translation wordings which are not native to the translation language. Typically they will be recognized as good orators or authors. They will constantly be asking of the translation: "Do we actually say (or write) it this way in our language?" If the answer is "no," they can be empowered to revise the translation until it is written in a manner that all speakers of the language recognize as being of high quality, ideally sounding like it was written originally in the target language. Or the process may call for them to note each wording which the checkers felt was unnatural and send the translation back to the translation team to revise. In any case, the process of translation, checking, and revision continues in a cyclical feedback fashion until a translation passes all appropriate checks. The goal would always be that the translation have the same propositional and rhetorical meanings, to the extant that it is humanly possible, as those intended by the original biblical authors.

Translation checking should take place on any translation of the Bible, regardless of which translation approach was used to produce it. There is a range of translation acceptability possible within the varieties of registers and reading levels which translation teams can used. So various translation approaches can be used to produce differing translations which reflect these desired literary levels. There is no one single "correct" translation for any single biblical text sentence. Different Bible versions will reflect differences desired for different audiences, such as those who might desire a more formal sounding Bible for liturgical use and others who might desire a less formal Bible version for use with unchurched individuals or children. But each version should still undergo a rigorous translation checking process, to try to bring each version up to the best level of exegetical and linguistic quality as possible.

The world has yet to see an English translation of the Bible which has undergone a meticulous checking process of the kind called for in this post. When such a translation is produced or when a current translation is revised with such checking, we will have better Bibles, ones which are not only accurate but pleasant to read because they sound good to millions of native English speakers.