Hats off to your more extensive work. From long ago memory for me; "In the beginning was the word". Logos = word? reason? logic? thought? That's just one word. Whose definition of that one word do we accept? Why do we think that definition is the same as it was 2000 years ago? Are words adequate to express thought, more, presumably inspired thought? If words are a poor reflection of divine inspiration, does that inspiration improve or become worse with each suceeding translation? I applaud the difficult work of translation, but believe that each translator's era, life, leanings, and learning colors his translation and changes the feeling and sense of the translated material.
Thanks for clarifying. I think I understand a little better where you are coming from now. I disagree with your perspective, however.
Words gain clarity and meaning when put into a larger context. If I ask "What does the word 'set' mean?" that is a nonsensical question. I could be referring to a noun or a verb. But if I start a sentence with "Pythagoras hypothesized that a set of points...", the meaning of set in that context becomes clearer, if not perfectly clear. I would argue that the same holds true in translation work. The choice of how to translate any given word is constrained by the context of the passage, other parallel passages, the remainder of the book, the known historical time period in which the book was written, etc.
It's a bit like Sudoku -- there's a sort of iterative process where you start by figuring out what some numbers have to be, then you get into a large middle area where you might have to guess and say I think that's a "5", and if so that means that must be a "3", and at the end you can tell whether you've got a good solution because it all fits together.
Your point about how do we know what a word means is an interesting one, and honestly I don't know the answer, but I suspect it is a similar sort of triangulation as I have already mentioned, where scholars of antiquity figure out what the words mean by the way they are used in other documents. Also, in the case of Greek, we have a little bit of a head start because, as I understand it, modern Greek is similar to ancient Greek, at least in some of the vocabulary and most of the alphabet.
Just to clarify something for those who may misinterpret your comment about "succeeding translations" -- the modern translations of the Bible of which I am aware are not translated from other intermediate translations, a la the old "telephone game". The process is that thousands of existing ancient Biblical texts have been compiled, compared and contrasted. Through a fascinating and complicated process called "textual criticism" -- which I have also done a little bit of -- the original text (the "autograph") can be reconstructed with a great deal of accuracy. It is from this reconstructed original text that the modern translators translate and generate their new version.
I should also add that most modern translations of which I am aware are a team effort. Initial translations are reviewed by other members of the team, and changes are made when appropriate.
I do agree with you on one thing, though, and that is that modern translations typically have a set of prioritized goals for their translation. Often, these goals are mutually exclusive. For example, one goal might be to adhere as closely and literally as possible to the original sentence structure. Another goal might be to make the translation flow well in English. A third goal might be to attempt to amplify, in a less literal way, what the original author has expressed in the original language. I think even if you don't want to go learn ancient Greek and textual criticism and so forth, you can both get a sense of the differences between the various translations as well as a sense of the underlying original Greek text by reading different modern English translations.
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