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All translations are biased by the translator; there is no such thing as a translation that "transparently" conveys the meaning of the original. Even moreso when you are dealing with writings from an ancient culture, where much of the cultural context is likely missing.

For example, Genesis 1:1 is often translated as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..." but that itself reflects a particular translator bias. The medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi) said it should instead read, "When God began creating..." by comparing how a particular word is used in other contexts. There is a subtle but important difference in meaning between the two translations: the first implies creation ex nihilo (as it says creation occurred "In the beginning"), while the second allows for an eternal universe within which our current world was created (and which may have gone through many acts of creation -- such a belief has been common in the more recent past). Of the two it is not at all clear which more "transparently" conveys the original meaning of the text -- because that meaning would only have been obvious to someone living 2500 years ago in ancient Israel (or possibly in the diaspora in Babylon).

> All translations are biased by the translator

All understanding of a communication is biased by the recipient (reader/listener), and translation necessarily compounds this by filtering the message the translator understands again though the translator’s own understanding, preferences, and style with regard to the target language.

EDIT: Of course, with a religious work where you’ve waved off human fallibility in authorship and compilation by simply denying that those were human acts, but instead adopting doctrine that they were divine acts through human instruments, you can just do the same for your preferred translation and the problem is neatly solved, at least within your doctrinal framework.

Even the sender of a communication may be a source of error by phrasing something different from what they meant to convey.

From not communicating in one’s native tongue or not learning one’s native language well enough to simple brain-farts - there are numerous things that can lead to miscommunication on the sender side, too.

Communication of complicated concepts is just incredibly lossy every step of the way.

> All translations are biased by the translator; there is no such thing as a translation that "transparently" conveys the meaning of the original

All software has bugs, but not all software is equally buggy. The same goes for translations and bias, humans and honesty, etc.

This is a (common) misinunderstanding of post-modernism. The idea isn't that you should take off your critical thinking cap and dismiss everything but that you should put it on - you don't get to take it off, ever - and make judgements about the varying qualities of (the translation), while being aware of your own bias. Like software developers, we are flawed beings using flawed tools to make flawed code, but that doesn't make us powerless to do better - we still can do incredible things.

Postmodernism goes further than that:

> Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty[0]

So in essence, postmodernism teaches that critical thinking is all about tearing down what it calls the illusion of objective reality, statements that are objectively true or false, objective knowledge, and certainty -- and finding (or at least positing) the subjective sources behind such illusions.

I object to such assertions and flatly deny that reality is subjective. Only perception is subjective -- and critical thinking ought to be used to get through to the objective truth. In the case of ancient texts, critical reading helps us establish what the original text most likely said.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

I feel like there's Straw Postmodernism where you can make anything true by wishing really hard, and Tautological Postmodernism, where the human senses are limited in resolution and your mind is limited in memory and cognition, and somewhere between them is a postmodernism that a sane person would bother arguing in favor of. I haven't seen it, of course, but I conjecture it's out there in the libraries somewhere.

IME, it's what is normally discussed when people genuinely want to know about it. Most of the discussion of post-modernism on the Internet is the misunderstanding upthread or anti-postmodernist rants (which ironically often are based on the same perspective as their target).

You're committing the fallacy of gray ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac... ).

> The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”

> The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view ...”

> —Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling

You have two colors. You say, “I know, I’ll make a color that covers everyone’s use case with regular expressions.” Now you have three problems.

That's the fallacy of gr[ae]y.

You have two competing colors. You design a new, unified color that covers the use cases of both. Now you have three competing colors.

this list is incomplete. you can help by expanding it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_color_spaces_and_their...

This is such a great idea.

Have you read Eknath Easwaran's translation of the Bhagavad Gita?

Its structure is Chapter-Introduction, Gita Chapter. If I remember correctly, the authenticated background information is mostly what goes on in the introduction to each chapter (i.e. 'Drona was born a brahmin, a member of the priestly caste, but in search of wealth he took up the way of the warrior and excelled in the knowledge of arms,' since the background of the character is not explained in the Gita itself).

I don't remember much personal commentary in the chapter introductions, and you can easily skip them and just read the Gita translation itself, since there are no commentaries interspersed with Gita translation.

I'm not sure if that meets your 'no personal commentaries' criteria, but I liked the translation. [Edit to add: listing some of the translations you have found wanting might help guide suggestions.]

Thanks! I checked it out, and Eknath Easwaran's translation looks good to me. All I have to do is skip the first couple of pages of each chapter.

I have not read any translation yet. Archive.org has Prabhupada's translation, which was the exact opposite of what I was looking for. So I dropped it after 5 minutes of skimming. I have chanted the Gita in some prayer groups when I was very young, without understanding any of it. That's about it.

Partly related: I found Eknath Easwaran's book on meditation interesting. Cannot comment more since I read it many years ago and don't remember details.

I've not read that one, but I also found his Dhammapada and Upanishads to be quite nice. His name on a work is a good sign, to me!

I agree from a anthropologic perspective, but its fun how bad translations often are the means for the evolution of a mythology, as well as the genesis of mythologies, and new mythos thrives on these. Often the worse the better, as it more quickly diverges from the original, and the complete lunacy the incomplete, shitty translator/fan fic writer creates requires explanations. For this reason I dont think bad translations should be removed, or perhaps even noted as such, as it inhibits this process. At the end of the day its someone's work of fan fiction on an out of copyright work, and while I might prefer the canon malfoy-potter, I'm not going to challenge the right of adherents of sensible alternatives like granger-devere, or even senseless and repugnant alternatives, to enjoy such work, they might be wrong, but its not like anyone should take this stuff seriously enough to be unkind. Not that copyright should limit peoples ability to create fan fiction anyways, but for in copyright works its seems reasonable to expect a non-canon header somewhere, though Id probably limit it to say a few decades. Aside from Disney, few question that the original work which inspired the stuff on sacred texts should be out of copyright.

"to transparently convey what the original scriptures say"

All translations are lossy. So why not read the original? Granted, Sanskrit is not easy. But it's not insurmountably difficult either especially for a person of Indian origin. And the language of the epics (of which the Gita is a part) is generally a lot simpler than in e.g. kavyas or technical shastras. A few months is long enough to pick up enough understanding of grammar and along with a dictionary you should be able to work through the relatively short Gita quite quickly. Yes, this is still much slower than reading a translation but if you're goal is avoiding commentorial bias this is the only rational way to go.

> if you're goal is avoiding commentorial bias this is the only rational way to go.

I don't mean to discourage anyone - it would be rewarding to learn the Sanskrit - but I wonder if the beginning reader understands more or less. Beginning readers in any language are arguably translating into their native language. An expert translator likely will do far better, understanding nuances, meanings, idioms, constructions, etc. that the noob is oblivious to.

Are the "original" Sanskrit texts floating around really original? Modern Sanskrit is significantly different that Vedic-era Sanskrit, or so I am told. Won't you be picking up just another translation if you try that?

Sorry only just saw this. We do not know 100% for sure but the historical consensus is the Gita is several hundred years younger than the latest stratum of Vedic texts, well within the era of classical Sanskrit. And the Vedic language (which technically is not Sanskrit as properly that refers to the language codified by Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali.) is somewhat different but not that different. I learned the parts of the Veda that I know the traditional way just memorizing the recitation without the meaning but based on my knowledge of grammar and vocabulary I can understand about 75% and a commentary takes care of the rest.

Another challenge with translations is the trade-off between conveying literal words or meaning. As a simple example, a literal translation of an idiom from a 5,000 year old culture in a far-off place will not be understood, or be misunderstood, by a person living in NYC today reading it on the Internet. Does the translator convey the literal words or convey the meaning using modern words (maybe idioms) that contain the same nuances?

The meaning. Literal words aren't the point of communication.

There was a good blog the translators wrote about translating Pathologic, a metaphor-heavy Russian video game. It takes place in a town where the districts are named after body parts of a bull, but the names have double meanings related to the town's power structure as well and the dialogue is heavy with this kind of wordplay. They wrote a bit about the process of translating not just the words, but also the wordplay into English.

Ultimately I don't believe this implied meaning can be perfectly conveyed (which is maybe why scholarly study of texts remains important?), but at least in sacred texts like the Bible you can insert footnotes to expand on what can't be directly conveyed in direct translation.

So what you’re trying to say is, that some of these need some <citation needed> tags?