Fumbled in translation

The King James Bible was translated about 400 years ago. Dr. Joel Hoffman, a Biblical scholar writing for the Huffington Post, notes six problems in translation techniques used in the creation of that Bible and English Bibles since then. Many of those errors persist in newer translations in spite of better scholarship.

How do we know if a translation is correct? We talk to someone who speaks the language and figure out whether the meaning they get from it is the same meaning we get. That doesn't work with ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. Even so, ancient languages work in many ways similar to modern languages so if we see a problem in modern language translation we can assume the same problem exists with ancient languages.

Here are the problem areas.
1. Etymology. Meanings of words are determined from their root words and the word's ancestry. But "grammar" and "glamour" mean two different things. Same with "ballot" and "bullet."

2. Internal structure. Look at typical suffixes, and word combinations. What does "strip mall" and "drive through window" literally mean? Does "office" relate to "officer"? Compare "post" and "postage" with "host" and "hostage."

3. Cognates. Meanings of a word or phrase in one language can differ from the same thing in another language. I ran across this one first-hand when I lived in Germany. The English "must" is the same as the German "muss." But "must not" means forbidden and "muss nicht" means optional.

4. Time. Even dealing with just English, words have changed meaning in the last 400 years. The case I know best begins, "Suffer the little children…" which does not mean Jesus wanted the kids to feel pain. Another example is we think of "you" as informal and "thee" as formal. But 400 years ago the opposite was true.

5. Metaphors. Shakespeare wrote, "Juliet is the sun." A modern take on the phrase is that one should be wary of melanoma when around Juliet.

6. Translators are quite reluctant to throw out old meanings. Lots of people my age and older want the King James version of Psalm 23 read at their funeral. But are those words still accurate?

What does work? Context. The word "sincerely" at the end of a letter only means "the name is next."

This posting includes a 21 minute TED talk by Dr. Hoffman that goes into these points in more detail and offers a few more examples.