Month: August 2024

This is the fourth blog post responding to the recent post by my friend Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? Here are links to those posts with some important takeaways: This leads me to my definition of accuracy: A translation is accurate when the original message is communicated to a new audience. No meaning should be added, removed, or changed in the translation. If I understood his position well, I think Aaron would identify my definition with communicative accuracy, something that he believes is more akin to clarity. On the website I just linked to, you will…

This is the third part of a series on translation responding to a recent post by Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? It probably would be helpful to read the other two posts first: On Meaning and On Audience, but here are some major takeaways from those two posts: With this background in mind, I would like to discuss something that Aaron mentions in his post, which is what translators call “explication.” Explicit and Implicit Information In order to understand explication you have to first understand that in human communication, we always say less than we mean….

In my last post (On Meaning) I began the build up to responding to a post by my friend Aaron Shryock regarding accuracy in Bible translation. In that post I made a claim that “while meaning in the source text can be discovered apart from the audience, meaning in the receptor language is very audience-dependant.” For context, when translating we take a source text (in our case, the Bible) and translate that text into a receptor language (Kwakum). In this post, I want to explain how meaning can be audience-dependant. Meaning in the Source Text is not Audience-Dependant First, I…

I recently read a post by a friend of mine, Aaron Shyrock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation?. I want to address some of the concerns that Aaron brought up in regards to accuracy, but I felt that it was first necessary to discuss the meaning of “meaning.” A while ago I wrote a blog that made the claim that all Translation is Meaning-Based. Check out that post if you want to see what I mean by that. As far as I know, Aaron would not disagree with this idea. When we translate (the Bible or anything else) we…