More on words and literal translations

This article isn’t about how Bibles often use ‘word’ (like ‘God’s word’) to mean something completely different from what ‘word’ normally means in modern English—there’s a separate article about that.

It’s not uncommon for literal English translations to advertise themselves as ‘always using the same English word for the same Greek word’ or similar. That’s never actually possible (otherwise John the Baptist would have sent ‘angels’ to ask Jesus a question in Luke 7:24). In fact, we would claim that word-for-word is probably not even desirable for most English Bible readers—in fact, you could strongly argue that it’s not even following the basic principles of translating between languages.

Remember how you were taught at school to not use the same word repeatedly in a paragraph—use a synonym the second time or change it from a noun to verb or something. Modern-English expects variety of vocabulary—if a text doesn’t have that, it’s not good, modern English. So the OET Readers’ Version actually strives to use variation as our aim is to produce a good, readable, modern-English translation. (Our Literal Version makes no claim to sound like fluent modern-English.)

Similarly with poetry. Hebrew poetry focuses on retelling a thought in different words. English poetry focuses more on metre and rhyme. We reserve the right to make some adjustments to Biblical poetry in our Readers’ Version.

Then we remove some words that have changed in meaning over the centuries. Our Exodus is ‘tabernacle-free’. And ‘ark-free’ (as is the Noah account in Genesis as well). In middle-English, ‘beast’ was commonly used for a ‘cow’—now, instead of that, it’s commonly used for some large, ugly creature. So our Revelation is ‘beast-free’ because ‘beast’ brings about the wrong word picture in our minds.

How many new words do we expect a new Christian to learn? Gospel, Psalm, Deuteronomy, Passover, Israelite, Levite, Pentecost, Sheol, Zion, redemption, disciple, leviathan, eunuch, manna, gleaning, deacon, leper, cherubim, sabbath, epistle, pentateuch, centurion, synagogue (for some), denarius? Or words that we might know, but have to learn a different meaning? Word, covenant, beast, priest, talent, blaspheme, elder, supper (for non-Americans), leprosy. The OET Readers’ Version strives to reduce this as much as we can.

Robert Hunt, July 2024