OK, so the title doesn’t precisely reflect the contents of this post, but I couldn’t think of another way to include all three of the very interesting elements in the blog post “Praise the Lord (of the Rings)” at Davar Akher. The post begins by highlighting something I didn’t know before, namely that J. R. R. Tolkien played a minor role in the production of the Jerusalem Bible translation.
The post then continues with some discussion and comparison of various translations, before getting around to describing the NIV as “a translation that I cannot recommend weakly enough.” This is because, although the author of the post praises the expressed aim of finding a balance between strict verbal equivalence and an extreme form of dynamic equivalence, the translators’ “rigid adherence to evangelical Protestantism belies their intention to present the Bible with its ‘original’ meaning, and even draws meanings from the Bible that are patently absent in the Hebrew altogether.” The example given to illustrate this point is Jonah 3:3b, where the NIV translates “Now Nineveh was a very important city – a visit required three days.”
The Hebrew could be more literally (and more accurately) translated, as e.g. in the KJV, as “Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey.” Why did the NIV opt to translate this differently? Simple: the plain, literal meaning of the text is wrong. And so to allow readers of the NIV’s English translation to persist in their mistaken belief that it is possible to believe the Bible to be completely factual when read at face value, they ‘did what had to be done’, and offered instead of a translation of what the Hebrew actually says, something else that is different from the meaning of the Hebrew but has the advantage of actually being correct.
I’ve looked at other examples on this blog before. I wonder, now that work has begun on a revision of the New International Version, such aspects of the classic NIV will be preserved, or whether this time they will put translating what the Bible actually says above offering Biblical literalists something they can believe.
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