My thoughts on God’s Word: “
.“
So, what do you think? Do you agree with … what do you mean you don’t see anything? Oh wait! You are expecting me to put my thoughts down on the page with words. Sorry, my bad. To do this without words just gives us a blank page. But my thoughts are in my head. They are not in written form yet. Thoughts are different from written words. So how does the Dynamic Equivalence approach (thought-for-thought) give us English thoughts for the original language thoughts of the biblical writers?
The Dynamic translator must study the original language text seeking the meaning or thought being presented. Once he has a solid understanding of what he thinks the thought or meaning of the text is, he then considers how to put this into English which is understandable to the average reader. There are two problems with this approach. First is the process of the translator and the second is the target of the translation.
The shortcoming of the Dynamic method is a very processed result. Unlike the Essentially Literal method which puts the onus of interpretation—the technical term: hermeneutics—on the reader, with the Dynamic approach the translator is taking on the heavy lifting of interpretation for us. They dissect what the Holy Spirt inspired the authors to write then reformulate it for his target audience. Clearly we are not getting what Paul, Luke, Moses, David, or the others said but what the translator thinks they mean. The key is the translator’s understanding of the meaning of the original language text.
The other problem is who is the translator targeting. When they speak of the “average” reader, they generally mean a very low-level reader. In many of these works, the reading level is at a middle school student’s reading ability and sometimes even at the level of an older grade schooler. There is a low opinion of the readers of these translations. Some will acknowledge the target was for those whose English is a second language, but the Bible is marketed to the English-speaking Church body in general.
By setting the target so low, the language is oversimplified, and the imagery is removed or reimagined from the original robbing it of its cultural significance. We are left with a flat and unmoving Bible. Some have promoted their translation for sounding like the daily paper. Do you remember the last item you read in the paper? Did you find it moving prose or poetry?
Let’s think of this with an illustration from outside the Bible. Plato was a philosopher from the 6th century BC. In the Republic, Plato used a now famous allegory of a cave to explain his philosophy. You don’t need to understand Plato to get the point of this illustration. Plato calls the things we see in this world “forms” and the real set of things the “universal.” Imagine a fire in the cave. You are near the wall, between the fire and the cave wall. In this illustration you are not able to turn around to see the fire. Between you and the fire are the universals. The fire cast shadows of the universals on the wall. Since you cannot turn around, all you see are the shadows on the cave wall. The shadows are all you perceive of reality, but the truth is they are just shadows or the forms of the true reality: the universals.
What if someone wrote a translation of Plato’s Republic from the original Greek into modern English using the Dynamic method? Instead of a cave with a fire and shadows on the wall, the translator used a movie screen with images projected on it. This would never be acceptable for a translation of Plato’s classic. It may be great as an illustration to explain Plato’s teaching but never as a translation. Yet the Body of Christ accepts this type of changes in the very Word of God. Think about this!
In future posts, especially those in the sub-topic of Translation Evaluation we give examples of these issues. The limit of writing a post excludes us from going into much depth at this point. What I am hoping to give you now are the concepts we can build on as we learn about English translations of God’s Word. In later posts we will seek to add depth.
I don’t want this to come across as if I am completely negative toward Bibles translated using Dynamic Equivalency. To be honest—and it is clear from what I have written in this post and others—I am not a great fan of the Dynamic Equivalent approach. I am unashamedly a supporter of the Essentially Literal method. Yet, these Dynamic translations can be useful as commentaries on the Bible. When used in that manner and not as one’s main reading, studying, preaching, or teaching Bible they can be of great worth. They give us not a blank page but an alternate view of a passage which can enhance our understanding of God’s Word as long as we keep in mind the translator’s influence on the page.
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg
Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash