Translations

Have you ever been in your parish priest’s office? Have you ever noticed how many books he has on bookshelves? Visit the home of a deacon. He will have as many, if not more books. Now take a look and find the Holy Bible. You won’t find one, you will find many! Most of them will not be the standard NAB Bible. What?! Why?

Realize that we call them translations. They are not the original text, but translations of the previous texts. Here is where human experience comes in. While the texts are given to us from God, the human mind can get in the way.

If you have ever traveled out of the country, or spoken through an interpreter to someone who doesn’t speak English, you might have heard a phrase similar to, “we don’t have a word for what you are saying.” This is common. English is one of the lease expressive languages. Most languages seen on our blue orb in space have been able to express their thoughts and ideas more accurately than we do with English.

Many times someone translating a word or phrase from a different language to English will substitute a similar word to express what is being translated. The translator brings in his own experience in to what they believe is being expressed from the speaker and relaying that to the person/group being spoken to. Their job is very difficult, highly scrutinized, and extremely demanding. The end result is never 100% accurate.

This is also seen in the Holy Scriptures. For a long time, different translations of the Bible were rewrites from a previous translation, which again, was a rewrite from another version. If there was an error made back in time, that error gets replicated throughout the centuries.

One has to remember that the languages our Holy texts were written in are dead languages and have been dead for hundreds of years now. As one of the priests in my parish told my 8^th grade RE class, Latin is a dead language. Therefore Latin doesn’t change. That is why the Church still uses it.

With all modern languages, they evolve. Remember when the word bad was not a good thing. Now everything is bad, and that means good. This is how languages evolve to keep up with the times we are in. There is also regional vernacular. How many of you have been caught up in the pop/soda debate? It is the same thing, a sweetened carbonated drink, but called something completely different depending on the region you are in. That makes it difficult for translators to keep up with.

Lately scholars have been going back to the original to translate from. The current batch of Bibles on the market is a lot closer to the original text. I said closer, not exact.

A single word can have many different meanings and it is all in how the interpreter translated that version of the Bible. Sometimes the original word doesn’t have a direct English translation. The word Love comes from three different words in the original text. Since there was not a direct translation for each different concept, the single word Love was used. Two of those different Love words are used in one of the most popular verses used in weddings, 1 Cor 13:4-7. We know it today as:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury, ot does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Here is the King James Version of the same verse:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thieth, no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Besides the obvious use of old English, there are a lot of differences. This all originated from the same text that St. Paul wrote almost 2,000 years ago. The individual, or individuals who translated that one section had different meanings behind the words.

That doesn’t even include that there are two different versions of love in the first translation. There is Agape love, or love from the creator. Then there is Philos love, or love for your fellow man and companion (the third is Eros love, which is a sexual form of love, but not used in these verses). Agape and Philos are intermixed in the verse. Since the initial translators decided not to explain out love, but merged the two different words in to one English word can change the meaning of the text (as we see in the King James Version).

Now before you start commenting about the use of the King James (Protestant) Bible and say this shows how far they have fallen from Catholicism, I have a few reasons to use it. First of all, more English speaking people than any other translation have used it. It also was started in 1604 and completed in 1607. Protestants don’t use this version much anymore. They are now on the NIV version, which translates the same verse identically to how it is in the Catholic Bible. Finally, I am an RCIA Catholic, a lot of my references come from growing up in many Protestant churches.

Here is what I do a lot, either before Mass or after Mass (I have gotten in to a lot of trouble from my wife doing this DURING Mass) is I use an app by Olive Tree that allows me to have multiple versions of the Bible on my phone. It can look at a verse, and you switch between translations (in English or multiple different languages that you may speak). It allows me to get closer to what the original author meant when he wrote the words I am reading and hearing.

Looking at different versions of the Bible is not wrong. It is just like reading different articles about the same event. You get a different interpretation of what happened, and the more you read, the closer you get to the absolute truth. Don’t blame the translator either, they are doing such a hard task with a lot of resources. Occasionally it comes down to a judgment call on how to translate a paragraph, phrase, or even a word. They pray hard before going in to their task. Every translation will have meaning to someone, and in God’s divine way, can open the eyes of someone who might not have been reached with one word different.