Have you read the Bible?

Samaris

Thanks, Peregrinus, I'd obviously either picked that up slightly wrong or remembered it so. Good to get it straight again.

Permabear

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gormdubhgorm

crashadder wrote: »

Religious activities should be banned in the world. Its 2017 for god sakes.

Absolam

recedite wrote: »

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I find it hard to imagine that non-English speakers share a hang up simply by not speaking English, so I'd probably discount that idea, but I think the idea is more than a lack of specificity in Arabic to English (or any other language, since the idea includes all translations) translation.

recedite wrote: »

The reason that the Koran is not generally translated is not because Arabic is untranslatable without something being lost in translation.
Its because Allah allegedly wrote it (directing Mohammad's pen hand in some remote controlled fashion) and therefore the actual words are supposed to be sacrosanct, exactly as written. Its also why words often appear on Islamic flags. The arabic words, the shapes or pictograms themselves, are assumed to carry some superstitious power even beyond their actual meaning.

This is more the meat of it; what Allah has expressed can only be understood in its entirety by having the context conferred by fluency in the language its expressed in, a language that has been shaped by a culture. The Quran is as far as I know unique in this regard, which is what makes it particularly interesting.

Permabear wrote: »

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Yes... Islam obviously considers this, and avoids it by virtue of the fact that (in theory at least) Quranic Arabic is also perfect and unchanging, a means unavailable to Christianity since it was spreading across multiple languages and cultures. The Catholic tradition of Christianity deftly deals with the issue in Dei Verbum, holding that Scripture is divinely inspired, as is Apostolic Tradition, so the Bible itself cannot be considered to be (at least solely) the eternal, unchangeable Word of God. Not quite as elegant as the Muslim solution, but more adaptable, so perhaps evidence of greater foresight.

Absolam

crashadder wrote: »

Religious activities should be banned in the world. Its 2017 for god sakes.

I bet someone was saying that in 1917. And 1617. And 1017. I bet someone wil be saying it in 4017.... if there's anyone around to say it.

Fourier

recedite wrote: »

Ludwig Wittgenstein was big on this notion, but I'm not a believer myself. I think its based on some hangup that non-English speakers tend to have. A skilled translator should be able to convey the original meaning of anything.

Why do you think this is a hang up unique to non-English speakers, what exempts English speakers?

Secondly, it depends on exactly what you mean by "convey" or "anything". For example some languages have several verbal moods English does not possess, such as Vevitives or Opatives, and the frequecy of their use can signal social class. I don't know how one could translate overuse of the Vevitive signalling a rural speaker except via a footnote. Similarly I know English novels that I've read in French where I'd struggle to see how the English could be perfectly conveyed.

I would think everything can be explained via footnotes for example, but I really don't think everything can be naturally translated in the text itself and that would be the opinion of most translation studies and linguistics monographs I have read. Why do you think otherwise?

Nick Park

Permabear wrote: »

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This is a major philosophical difference between Christianity and Islam. Central to Christianity is the concept of the Incarnation - that God came to earth as a human (and with human limitations as to omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence) but did not cease to be God.

The "allegedly eternal, unchangeable Word of God" in Christianity is not a book, but a Person - Jesus Christ. But the way we can get to know him today is through the written word.

Unlike Islam (where the book stops being the word of God if translated out of Arabic) translatability is inseparable from Christianity. The original manuscripts of the Gospels (allegedly, if you prefer) contain the words Jesus spoke to his disciples - words that were spoken in Aramaic. Yet they were written in Greek. So the original manuscripts themselves were a translation of sorts.

From a communication theory perspective. All communication involves coding and decoding. You have an idea in your head. You encode it (put it into words). Your listener then decodes it (interprets your words) and get an idea in their head. If you're both using the same code, then they get your drift. If they're using a different code then we end up with the "No, that's not what I meant at all!" scenario.

Traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the Catholic Church has the code book so you cannot truly understand the true message (the original thought in God's head that he coded into language) unless you submit to the Church.

Protestantism teaches that each believer should pray for the Holy Spirit to help them decode the words (since they also believe the Holy Spirit inspired the writers of the biblical books, this means that, in theory, the reader's codebook is the same as the sender of the message).

recedite

Fourier wrote: »

Why do you think this is a hang up unique to non-English speakers, what exempts English speakers?

Because English has become the dominant international language. Just as in ancient biblical times it was Greek.
People who are not native speakers of the lingua franca are still forced to conduct a lot of their business/studies through it, leading to them developing hang-ups about whether they are missing anything. Native speakers on the other hand, just wait for any relevant work to be translated. If the translation is imperfect, somebody else will draw attention to the imperfection and correct it.
The same process does not work in reverse. If you are Polish and your English is not good, you can't expect to ever get the full and proper meaning from a work originally published in Japanese.

I agree with your point re the footnotes, but I include them as part of the general translation process.

Fourier

recedite wrote: »

I agree with your point re the footnotes, but I include them as part of the general translation process.

Okay that makes more sense, in that sense any purely factual aspects can be translated, but a proper translation, especially for older works would basically have to be an annotated academic copy.

However I do think literary or emotional impact will be severly lessened, there's a big difference between immediate cultural comprehension and a discursive three paragraph explanation in terms of literary impact, eg:

"Jaysus that lad 's fierce tall"

Vs

"My word*, that man* is* quite* tall"

* The original text has the speaker use colloquial forms of the local deity's name, the noun refering to a male adult, the adjectival intensifier and a marked contraction of the copular verb. This signalled a rural speaker of this regional dialect of English circa 1920-2040 AD

The rest though, regarding insecurity of speakers of other languages is pure personal conjecture unless you have evidence of such an effect.

smacl

Fourier wrote: »

some languages have several verbal moods English does not possess, such as Vevitives or Opatives, and the frequecy of their use can signal social class. I don't know how one could translate overuse of the Vevitive signalling a rural speaker except via a footnote.

Ok, you got me. What's a Vevitave or Opative? Google draws and blank, as does Google Scholar, the OED and the couple of paper dictionaries I posses. Capitalisation suggests proper nouns buts that is about all I can find.

Fourier

smacl wrote: »

Ok, you got me. What's a Vevitave or Opative? Google draws and blank, as does Google Scholar, the OED and the couple of paper dictionaries I posses. Capitalisation suggests proper nouns buts that is about all I can find.

Should be Venitive and Optative. Venitive is used in Semetic languages, like Babylonian.

looksee

I think it is Optative rather than Opative, it indicates wish or hope. No idea what Vevitave means.

looksee

Sorry Fourier our replies overlapped, thank you for the clarification.

Fourier

looksee wrote: »

Sorry Fourier our replies overlapped, thank you for the clarification.

No worries, going on memory and totally messed up the names. Even worse I actually told somebody about the Venitive a few months ago (talking about Gilgamesh) and now they must be using the wrong word as well.

oldrnwisr

Pherekydes wrote: »

Anyway, to get back on track, does anyone think that the Koran might be a good follow-up to the Bible?

Not really no. Having read the Koran, it's not really an experience I'd recommend. The history and construction of the Koran make reading it far more gruelling than the bible. Firstly, it isn't a canon of disparate works, it is a monolithic assembly of revelations. As such, it is designed more to be prayed than it is to be read. Secondly, to read the Koran as it was received you have to read it in reverse order since the oldest revelations are assembled at the back. The revelations themselves are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Also, from a counterapologetics perspective, it is much more difficult to pick apart the facts behind the Koran. For example, the virgin birth mistranslation raised by Samaris is easily picked apart because we have other non-Biblical Greek and Hebrew texts to examine which allow us to analyse claims made by Christians about this so-called prophecy. The same is not true (at least to the same extent) in Arabic.

Peregrinus wrote: »

The Septuagint translates this passage from Isaiah using the Greek word parthenos. A parthenos is definitely a virgin.

Sorry, Peregrinus, minor nitpick but parthenos is not exclusively virgin. There is evidence from other Greek works to indicate that the term parthenos was one of social rather than biological function like almah. In Book 2 of the Iliad we see Actor son of Astyoche who is referred to as a parthenos. In Aristophanes' The Clouds we are told of an unnamed parthenos who had to give her first-born child up for adoption. In Pindar's Pythian odes, we see Coronis who is most definitely not a virgin. Also, of course, in the Septuagint we see Dinah in Genesis 34:3 being referred to as a parthenos even after she has been raped.

Peregrinus wrote: »

What this tells us is that Matthew already understood Is 7:14 as a prediction of a virgin birth and, furthermore, he assumed his readership would understand it the same way. So, if that’s a misinterpretation arising out of a translation issue, it’s a misunderstanding that arose early on, before the Christian scriptures were composed. It was already around to influence the Christian scriptures.

Matthew is in fact our source for the story that Jesus was born of a virgin. (There are earlier references to Jesus in the letters of Paul and in the Gospel of Mark, but none of them mention a virgin birth.) There’s a view, in fact, that Matthew simply made up the virgin birth story in order to connect Jesus with the prophecy in Isaiah 7. Or, there was already a virgin birth tradition, which Matthew included in his gospel in order to make the line with Isaiah 7. Either way, none of this makes sense unless you assume that, in Matthew’s Greek-speaking Jewish world, Isaiah 7:14 was already understood as prophesying a virgin birth.

Well, here's the thing. The idea that Isaiah 7:14 was understood to be a Jesus prophecy pre-Matthew is weak IMHO. Firstly, even 70 years or so after Matthew's gospel the virgin birth "prediction" was a controversial claim. In Dialogue with Trypho, Justin Martyr has to defend the Christian ideas around Isaiah 7 as prophecy to his Jewish interlocutor. Secondly, Matthew's gospel is written with a distinctly pro-Jewish slant, with notable features such as the Lesser Commission in Matthew 10, the idea that salvation is for/from the Jews (echoing John 4) in Matthew 15 and the exhortation to keep the commandments in Matthew 5. As such one of Matthew's key objectives is proving that Jesus is indeed the foretold Jewish Messiah. To this end he distorts and fabricates prophecies to prove his case. We have prophecies which are just plain made up like Matthew 2:23 and 27:9-10 and we have distorted (often misquoted) prophecies like Matthew 2:14-15 (a misquote of Hosea 11:1).
Of course, Matthew isn't alone in distorting the Old Testament for their own purposes. John 2:17 misapplies Psalm 69:9 as a prophecy about Jesus but Matthew makes many more references to prophecies than other authors (20, in fact).
I think it's much more likely that the virgin birth as Jesus prophecy idea originated with Matthew rather than being a pre-existing idea which Matthew decided to talk about.

recedite wrote: »

Ludwig Wittgenstein was big on this notion, but I'm not a believer myself. I think its based on some hangup that non-English speakers tend to have. A skilled translator should be able to convey the original meaning of anything.

Well you'd think so, but there are persuasive reasons why this is not the case.

Firstly, I've mentioned this before on another thread but it bears repeating here. Take Psy's song Gangnam Style, for example. The song contains the repeated line "oppa gangnam style". Oppa ( 오빠) is a Korean word which usually refers to a woman's older brother but is used by Psy in the song to refer to himself in the third person. There is no way for an English speaker to simply or effectively communicate the full meaning of oppa to another English speaker but a Korean person will understand its meaning immediately. There are concepts missing from English which make intuitive sense to native speakers, concepts like evidentiality, polychronic time, absolute direction, time-independence which are extremely difficult to translate into English in a way that makes sense to both the original text and the reader.

Secondly, if the Koran were a properly de novo work then you might be able to avoid some of the translation issues that have occurred in other books but it isn't. There are more than fifty people and events mentioned in the Koran which are borrowed from the Bible. For example, the tale of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22 is retold as Abraham and Ishmael in Surah 37. Syncretic borrowings can often lead to translation issues that go unnoticed for a long time.
For example, the Old Testament Book of Proverbs is a book which is supposedly written by King Solomon, imparting his legendary wisdom. However, we now know that the book was copied almost verbatim from the earlier Egyptian text "Instruction of Amenomope". As a result of copying errors some passages from Proverbs have now been translated entirely differently:

Proverbs 22:20

"Have I not written to thee excellent things in counsels and knowledge"
(KJV)

"Have I not written thirty sayings for you, sayings of counsels and knowledge."
(NIV)

"Have I not written to thee three times with counsels and knowledge."
(YLT)

So here we can see how a single verse is rendered entirely differently. The difference results from a copying error from the original text which causes the meaning of the original passage to be lost.

When we look at the parallel passage from the earlier work we see that the modern translations bear little resemblance to the original.

"Look to these thirty chapters, they inform they educate."
Instruction of Amenomope, Chapter 30, Line 539

The problem is that the Hebrew word shelowshiym or

שְׁלוֹשִׁים

which translates as thirty is copied into the later work as shilshowm or:

שִׁלְשׁוֹם

which means three days ago. However since a translation of three days ago would make no sense in the context of Proverbs later scribes had to come up with different interpretations to reconcile the mistake.

Absolam

recedite wrote: »

Because English has become the dominant international language. Just as in ancient biblical times it was Greek.
People who are not native speakers of the lingua franca are still forced to conduct a lot of their business/studies through it, leading to them developing hang-ups about whether they are missing anything. Native speakers on the other hand, just wait for any relevant work to be translated. If the translation is imperfect, somebody else will draw attention to the imperfection and correct it.
The same process does not work in reverse. If you are Polish and your English is not good, you can't expect to ever get the full and proper meaning from a work originally published in Japanese.

If you're reading a work translated from Japanese to Polish, what difference does it make how good your English is? The same with Arabic to Italian, or Greek to French; being a non English speaker doesn't seem to enter into it at all, never mind cause any hang ups.

recedite

Absolam wrote: »

If you're reading a work translated from Japanese to Polish, what difference does it make how good your English is?

I meant to say that the work would likely only be translated into English, so the Polish speaker would be reading it in English.

oldrnwisr wrote: »

Oppa ( 오빠) is a Korean word which usually refers to a woman's older brother but is used by Psy in the song to refer to himself in the third person. There is no way for an English speaker to simply or effectively communicate the full meaning of oppa to another English speaker but a Korean person will understand its meaning immediately.

Right, but have you not just translated that Korean word into English, by way of a footnote?

smacl

recedite wrote: »

Right, but have you not just translated that Korean word into English, by way of a footnote?

I was also thinking this. To suggest that a word used in a given context cannot be translated from one language to another implies that the thing or concept that the word describes is beyond the comprehension of the person who speaks the target language, e.g. like trying to describe a new primary colour. It seems reasonable that it might take a paragraph or more to make a successful translation, but if a thing can be explained it can be translated. Where a word encapsulates a complex concept or abstract idea that itself sits atop of an underlying canon of information, e.g. qi in taijiquan, it doesn't mean it can't be translated, so much as the translation doesn't have much value without understanding the context.

Absolam

recedite wrote: »

I meant to say that the work would likely only be translated into English, so the Polish speaker would be reading it in English

Why would the Quran only be translated into English? I'd expect a Polish speaker to read a Polish translation, would you not?

robindch

smacl wrote: »

To suggest that a word used in a given context cannot be translated from one language to another implies that the thing or concept that the word describes is beyond the comprehension of the person who speaks the target language, e.g. like trying to describe a new primary colour.

Really depends on what you mean by translation - one could be converting the words or the meaning or the rhythms of the language or the tone or the register or the philosophical or humorous or cultural references, wordplay and so on.

All of these are hard enough on their own, but trying to do them all together and having the target language resonate with a typical reader/listener in the same fashion as it did in the source language is hard to impossible, all the more so for poetic, metaphorical, allusional etc prose.

Douglas Hofstadter's excellent Le Ton beau de Marot explores translation at some length and with thoughtful panache.

oldrnwisr

recedite wrote: »

Right, but have you not just translated that Korean word into English, by way of a footnote?

OK, for clarity I'll break it down a bit. If you simply plug the word oppa into Google translate you'll get the word brother as a translation. You can add a footnote to explain that it usually is used to refer to a woman's older brother. But there is no way to translate oppa as it is used in Gangnam style in such a way that an English person will understand it without losing the subtlety and message of the original text.

There are some notable of examples of when this goes badly wrong. In 1995, the following ad aired on TV for the original Sony Playstation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIyEqpYnEaU

English speakers understood the S.A.P.S. in the video as a play on the word sap. However, the year this ad originally aired I was on a school trip to France where the ad was also airing. In France, the ad was translated directly so that Society Against PlayStation became Societe Contre PlayStation. Thus the key in-joke was lost. Now this could be explained by careless or lazy translation but this is unlikely on the part of a tech giant like Sony. It's more likely that it simply isn't possible to translate the society against playstation acronym into French and keep the joke at the same time. It's one or the other.

There are words which can be translated easily but their proper usage cannot. For example, both buenas noches and bonne nuit translate into English as good night. However, one is a general greeting to be used at any time in the evening while the other is used only at bedtime. You can translate the words but the meaning may be lost.

There are also words which cannot be easily translated. German is a good example of this. Rewboss explains in more detail here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRK694NA6Cc

To translate a german word like betriebsblind (no. 3 in the video above) is going to take an English speaker a whole paragraph because it requires the explanation of a complex concept. By the time you get through properly translating the word, the simplicity of the original word is lost.

One of the supposedly miraculous features of the Quran is the beauty of the language. As Yahiya Emerick explains in "The Holy Quran in Today's English":

"One of the features that Muslims consider to be miraculous is the fact that the verses are quasi-poetic in nature in that they often follow precise rhyme and metre. One can hear this distinctly when listening to the Quran being read aloud in its original Arabic. So not only was the Quran conveying a message, but it was also acting as a kind of spellbinding entertainment."

Of course it's not just Arabic. All languages have some kind of text that doesn't translate well without it's poetry being lost. For example, in Mandarin there is a tongue-twister called "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den". In English, the poem reads as follows:

A poet named Shi lived in a stone room,
fond of lions, he swore that he would eat ten lions.
He constantly went to the market to look for ten lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions came to the market
and Shi went to the market.
Looking at the ten lions, he relied on his arrows
to cause the ten lions to pass away.
Shi picked up the corpses of the ten lions and took them to his stone room.
The stone room was damp. Shi ordered a servant to wipe the stone room.
As the stone den was being wiped, Shi began to try to eat the meat of the ten lions.
At the time of the meal, he began to realize that the ten lion corpses
were in fact were ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.

All very mundane in English, but in Mandarin each word in the poem is the sound "shi" with different inflections acting as both poetry and a tongue-twister. As with the previous examples you can translate the words all you want but the message may be lost.

King Mob

oldrnwisr wrote: »

As with the previous examples you can translate the words all you want but the message may be lost.

Once I tried showing Spaceballs to my Japanese students. They couldn't understand why I found it so funny.
The best joke in the entire movie is translated very literally and the name "Col. Sanders" isn't as well known here. So the entire thing is lost to anyone who isn't a native speaker. To get it not only do you need to know English, but you have to understand colloquial English, slang like "chicken" and have a base knowledge of the names of fast food mascots...

smacl

robindch wrote: »

Really depends on what you mean by translation

To my mind in this context it is to convey the complete intended meaning from one language to another. The result may be clumsy at times and lack the artistry of the original, hence many translations being more footnotes than text, but the translation is still possible.

antiskeptic

Permabear wrote: »

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A Calvinist who believes she was predestined to Hell? That strikes me as unusual. Whilst Calvinists believe God predestines man to heaven and hell, the Calvinist usually believes they have fallen on the right side of the tracks. I'm not sure where the stick beating has application: if predestined to heaven you can sit back and relax. If predestined to Hell then no amount of stick beating is going to alter that fact.

With Catholicism she's now in with a chance.

Should she ever encounter salvation by grace she'll have finally hit that home run!

The Bible-reading session is so far proving to be really interesting and even fun. We've read Genesis 1-11 so far, with the creation, fall, flood, Ark, etc. It's striking to me how compact it all is, with stories we've heard recycled dozens of times, and which are vastly expanded in texts like Paradise Lost, taking up just a few paragraphs in Genesis.

Yet there is so much in there - especially in relation to the fall. It'd be interesting to come back to it once you get to exposition in the NT on the problem with man and what God has done about it.

A cover-to-cover guide through the Bible I read some years back was subtitled "God's plan for the redemption of man". There are many themes in the Bible but if there is one central one to hold in mind, an overarching lens to view things through (and keep an eye out for), then this is the one to keep in mind. Man turning from God, man suffering on account of his turning from God, God constantly trying to pull man back

The fall is a fascinating, theologically packed, if brief, ground zero account for all that comes afterwards.

Permabear

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Fourier

antiskeptic wrote: »

The fall is a fascinating, theologically packed, if brief, ground zero account for all that comes afterwards.

Just to note this is almost certainly not the intent of the original authors, the "fall" isn't that important a concept in the Tanakh. Also, there is much less Talmudic commentary on it than on parts of Mosaic law.

The Priestly account of creation (Gen. 1:1 - 2:3) has no fall at all. The Oral account (Gen. 2:4 - 3:23) contains the fall story, but it more relates to Yahweh fearing humans gaining immortality than being an account of our degeneration.

Considering the Priestly account was written shortly after Cyrus of Persia allowed the Jews to return to Israel from Babylon, circa 520 BC, the absence of it in their account shows its lack of importance to the high priests of the temple at that time. All of the Tanakh/Old Testament, excepting parts of the Ketuvim/Writings section, would have been constructed at this time by somebody in the temple priest hierarchy, most likely Ezra. Hence from the vantage point of those who created the Tanakh this is not an important theme.

Of course it is very important to Christianity, but that's a retrospective meaning inserted into the text.

Peregrinus

Fourier wrote: »

Just to note this is almost certainly not the intent of the original authors, the "fall" isn't that important a concept in the Tanakh. Also, there is much less Talmudic commentary on it than on parts of Mosaic law . . . Of course it is very important to Christianity, but that's a retrospective meaning inserted into the text.

This. Christians and Jews have a large chunk of scripture in common, but they read them very differently.

Christians see the Incarnation as the central event in human history, and everything that happened before and afterwards is understood in the light of that event. This means, essentially, that the whole of the Old Testament is to be read in the light of the Gospels, which obviously is not a reading that Jews would share.

So, for example, all the fuss we looked at earlier about whether Isaiah 7:14 prophesies a virgin birth? Leaving aside the question of virginity, Christians approach that passage on the basis that it refers to the Messiah, who in Christian terms is understood to be Jesus Christ. But Jews generally don't see it as a messianic prophecy at all; whether the birth it refers to is or is not a virgin birth, it is not the birth of the Messiah. Similarly in the Garden of Eden story Christians tend to identify the serpent with Satan, but in most Jewish readings the serpent is just a serpent.

This isn't necessarily the Christians making stuff up out of whole cloth. Judaism at the time of Christ was a very diverse movement, with all kinds of competing readings and interpretations of scripture. Many of the Christian readings come from Jewish schools of interpretation. But after the catastrophe of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the priestly class, Judaism went through a process of disintegration and consolidation, and what resulted was the rabbinic Judaism that we know, that to some extent defined itself in opposition to Christianity. The result was that appproaches to scripture, or readings of scripture, not favoured by Christians came to be favoured by Jews, while those favoured by Christians tended to be rejected by Jews.

smacl

Permabear wrote: »

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On a similar theme, Albert Camus' The Fall makes for a good read.

robindch

smacl wrote: »

The result may be clumsy at times and lack the artistry of the original, hence many translations being more footnotes than text, but the translation is still possible.

A general translation of the ideas is always possible, but something which reflects the original in every aspect is hard to impossible - for much the same reason as an oil painting rendered in chalk or a watercolor in pencil will never fully reflect the original either.

Fourier

smacl wrote: »

To my mind in this context it is to convey the complete intended meaning from one language to another. The result may be clumsy at times and lack the artistry of the original, hence many translations being more footnotes than text, but the translation is still possible.

Yes, this is true, but I think it is a very extended notion of translating. I don't see a text retaining none of the poetry, alliteration, punning, turns of phrase, etc as being a total translation. You are losing exactly those qualities which make a work literature, the original author didn't intend to convey their intent via dry explanatory paragraphs.

As robindch said, it won't reflect the original accurately. It will convey all the pure information content in a certain sense, but I think this counts as a total translation only for works which contain no literary element.

Also I think it discounts how rarely translations of your type are actually done. They're virtually non-existent outside of academic translations of ancient texts. So although it may be theoretically possible, you're not going to have such a translation in most situations.

However the earlier point of this being something only non-English speakers believe due to insecurities I don't think can be shown to be true.