The Translation Process of the Bible

The Translation Process of the Bible.
A good translation is one of the most essential tools for interpreting the Bible. A good translation makes it easier to understand the text, helps the reader think better about it, and improves their ability to discuss the text with other people. But a good translation also requires a lot of work. It requires the translator to grasp the original meaning of the text, express that meaning as faithfully as possible in another language, and do all this while making sure the reader understands the translation. Translators of various versions of the Bible have adopted different approaches in translation to get an accurate message of the books in the Bible.
Translation of the Bible has involved the use of textual criticism, formal, and functional equivalence to get the original meaning of the text from the original Hebrew and Greek languages. Textual criticism involves external evidence, which is examining the original manuscripts of the Bible to determine the age and quality of the text. It also involves internal evidence, which is the examination of the copyist to find the original text. That allows the translator to express the original meaning of the text as accurate as possible in other languages, making it easier for the reader to understand the text. Formal equivalence involves using the same word, in the same way, to express the same idea in both the original and the translation. For example, the original text says that Abraham “lent” money to Melchizedek. The translation of the Bible uses the same word to express this idea: “Abraham lent to Melchizedek”. On the other hand, functional equivalence in translation is to make the text in the target language resemble the text in the source language as closely as possible in terms of both content and style. That means that Hebrew and Greek idioms used in the Bible are translated into what is similar in English.
Fee outlines the challenges that translators face when trying to translate the Bible. T...