Book review of A Guide to Bible Translation

Chris Lovelace (Translation Consultant) has just published an 18-page review of Noss and Houser's book A Guide to Bible Translation. Chris has a breadth of knowledge on the topic of Bible translation, including the history of Bible translation in various languages in the world. 

Click here to download a free pdf of his article.

Book Review (Extended): A Guide to Bible Translation: People, Languages, and Topics by Philip A. Noss and Charles S. Houser. SATS (South African Theological Seminary) Journal: Conspectus, Volume 33. April 2022. pgs 119-137.

Mark Strauss on why the ESV should not become the standard English version, at least not yet

Mark Strauss wrote a thoughtful article worthy of consideration, "Why the English Standard Version (ESV) Should Not Become the Standard English Version: How to Make a Good Translation Much Better." He writes as one who likes the ESV but is offering a constructive critique to improve it.

He is well-suited to offer such critiques. He has served on the revision committee of the NCV and as a consultant for the NLT, and he presently serves on a committee for the NIV/TNIV and on an editorial team for a new version yet to be released by Thomas Nelson (proposed name, the Expanded Bible).

Strauss surveys problems in the ESV and divides them "into eleven broad categories: (1) 'oops' translations, (2) idioms missed, (3) textual problems, (4) exegetical errors, (5) collocational clashes, (6) archaisms, (7) inconsistent gender-language, (8) awkward and unnatural style, (9) word-order problems, (10) run-on sentences, and (11) mistranslated genitives." He provides multiple examples in each category, though he makes clear that he does not claim to find all the problems.

Here are a couple of examples from Strauss' "oops" translation category:

Rock badgers are people too!

Prov. 30:26 ESV “the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer; rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the cliffs;” 

Comment: In addition to the tortured word order, the ESV’s use of “people” is very strange. We sometimes joke that animals are people too, but surely ants and rock badgers are “creatures” or “species,” not people.  

Nice legs! 

Ps. 147:10 ESV “His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man,” 

Comment: Taking pleasure in a man’s legs will surely leave readers chuckling. 

TNIV reads “in the power of human legs”; NET has “by the warrior’s strong legs.” 

 In Strauss' category "idioms missed," one of the examples he provides is Acts 8:23:

ESV For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. 

Comment: The “gall of bitterness” is a Greek idiom that means bitterly resentful or envious. Very few English readers have any idea what “gall” is. The translation “bile of bitterness” might be better but is still obscure and inaccurate, since this was likely a dead metaphor by the first century. The second phrase “bond of iniquity” is also obscure and archaic. 

TNIV For I see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin.
NET For I see that you are bitterly envious and in bondage to sin.

Strauss concludes by arguing that "half-idioms" do not result in either faithful translation nor natural English. Instead--as is standard practice in Bible translation--he wisely suggests that we should ask how anyone speaking English would say it (My comment on this point: The crucial question, of course, is what is the skopos for the English translation? Who is the target audience and their level of English, and which dialect--or sub-dialect--of English does the translation target? Etc.). Highlights below are mine:

There is an unfortunate tendency among biblical scholars—who live in the world of Hebrew and Greek—to think they are getting it “right” if they mimic the form of the original languages. The unfortunate result is a tendency to create “half-idioms” (half-English/half-Greek), transferring a few words of the original, but missing its meaning in standard English. This is what the ESV does when people speak “with a double heart” (Ps. 12:2), have “news in their mouths” (2Sam. 18:25), “go in and out among them” (Acts 1:21; 9:28), or “fill up the measure of their fathers” (Matt. 23:32). These are half-idioms—Biblish rather than English. As noted earlier, idioms work as a whole rather than through their individual parts. In translating the English idiom, “He’s really in a pickle,” it would be a mistake to preserve cucumbers in the translation. It is not the component parts but the statement as a whole that communicates its meaning. 

Some critics have claimed that the only way to protect the verbal and plenary inspiration of Scripture is to translate literally. This, of course, is linguistic nonsense. The translation that best preserves the verbal and plenary inspiration of Scripture is one that clearly and accurately communicates the meaning of the text as the original author intended it to be heard. The Greek idioms that Paul or John or Luke used did not sound awkward, obscure or stilted to their original readers. They sounded like normal idiomatic Greek. Verbal and plenary inspiration is most respected when we allow the original meaning of the text to come through. 

Asking the simple question, “Would anyone speaking English actually say this?” is a good test for standard English. This simple question could transform our Bible versions and bring them in line with the finest translation practices used around the world. We must remember that the ultimate goal of Bible translation is not to give our students a “crib” on their weekly Greek and Hebrew assignments, but to clearly and accurately communicate the meaning of God’s inspired and authoritative Word. 

Using AI in Bible Translation

Nguyen's MAP article on translating the OT using Artificial Intelligence

Duy Niem Nguyen just posted an interesting essay at MAP, "Using Neural Translation Technology to Translate the Old Testament from the New Testament." His essay includes step-by-step instructions for how to execute the process of using the data from a NT translation to provide a rough draft of the entire OT with the AI tools available by Google (read the whole thing here): 

The purpose of this essay is to raise awareness of using neural translation technology for Bible translation. My idea is using the New Testament vocabulary of existing translation and create the first draft of the Old Testament for that language with the neural translation technology provide by Google. In this essay, I will explain the neural translation technology, its potential, and practical usages for Bible translation with all the tools freely available for public usage. 

First, Google provides The Seedbank (https://research.google.com/seedbank/). It is a depository of the pre-made, ready-to-test programs in Python code for many applications of Artificial Intelligence. In this Seedbank depository, there is a program name Neural Translation with Attention (https://research.google.com/seedbank/seed/neural_translation_with_attention). This program is a demonstration of neural translation technology, and especially it shows the implementation of two well-known algorithms: seq2seq and Attention. This program exposes the inner working of a neural translation engine, and the best thing is: it is open-sourced, ready to modified and free to use for any kind of application. It is the program that I want to modify for the task of Bible translation. Google also provides the tool to test this program: the Google Colab cloud server...(continue reading here)

My brief analysis

The use of such AI, while perhaps helpful in fronting a significant amount of data for a team, should be exercised with caution by a translation team (and/or consultant). Some of my initial concerns are:

     1. Key terms 

The key terms in the OT are not the same in the NT, and the OT contains several key terms that do not occur in the NT. 

     2. Accurate and natural OT discourse

In addition, AI is not able to produce a document that is sensitive to natural TL discourse, let alone conduct good exegesis and analysis of the OT Hebrew/Aramaic, since the data is limited to two input translations--one in the target language and the other in a language of wider communication. Thus, the risk of producing a grand-daughter translation might be rather high, especially if the other translation steps are not practiced in rigor. Translation of individual terms and/or expressions does not equal faithful and natural clauses and discourse.

     3. Actual payoff or net-negative impact?

In the end, I have to wonder if using AI in the way Nguyen suggests is actually time efficient or productive (helpful in producing a draft of the Scriptures that is faithful to the Hebrew/Aramaic). If significant revision of the rough draft would be necessary, or if the discourse and other terms need complete overhaul (for example), how helpful is an AI-produced rough draft? Does it have net-negative benefits? Such analysis is impossible to make at present, but as more exploration occurs in this area, hopefully scholars will conduct careful studies to research these and other questions. 

Despite these shortcomings that seem intrinsic to the current limits of AI, I am nevertheless open to its (limited) use and development, in the hope that AI might become an effective tool for the global Bible translation movement.