Quote:
Originally Posted by Sporadic
Which one would be considered closest to the original text?
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I'm not trying to sound superior, here, but in asking that question you indicate that you don't really understand the issue. Here's a chart I found:
But the most "literal" translations are often very difficult to understand and even more difficult to relate to. It's just those Japanese instructions you get translated into English; if you just make word-for-word subsitutions what you get is something that's impossible to comprehend. The KJV is more "literal" than many contemporary versions, but it also contains outright "errors" based on poor understanding of translations at the time.
The whole point of most modern translations is to be more accurate but at the same time less literal, and more understandable in modern English. Most of the Bibles you find in churches these days fall somewhere in the middle between literal and paraphrase.
But no one really knows what the "original" text was. Does a certain word mean "virgin" or "young woman"? Well in Greek at one time it mean one thing and at another time another. But if I replace "virgin" with "young woman", am I denying a holy truth about Mary? The literal translation of the Hebrew word for "spirit" is "wind", but if I start talking about the Holy Wind it loses something, not to mention causing millions of children to titter. They *meant* spirit if if they did not literally *write* spirit. When the Hebrew text literally speaks of women "grinding together", again, it makes the modern reader's imagination run wild, but what the text *really* meant was grinding *grain* together. Yet the word for grain or wheat is not literally written in the text. Thus you get a form of translation called "dynamic equivalence" which tries to resolve these issues.