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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

Rather superficial article about the subject. Whole books are written about the subject or why one translation is better than another. (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) The article does not even touch upon culture things, such like how to deal with a translation for a culture where pigs are kept as pets or cattle, while in the old testament they are considered as unclean animals. It also does not mention that there is not one Greek text upon which the new testament is based, but that there are many variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Te...

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> Rather superficial article about the subject. Whole books are written about the subject

Well yes, it's an introductory article prompted by the "whole book" it specifically points readers to — The Word, by John Barton [1].

The whole point of the article is that if this intro whets your appetite, go read that book.

Not sure what else you're expecting from a short, 750-word weekly magazine column about language.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Word-How-Translate-Bible_and-Matters/...

> Rather superficial article about the subject.

I liked the article because it gave a general idea on how hard it is to translate very old religious texts. I don't think it's trying to write a theological analysis, just giving a basic understanding of the subject.

For those who are more interested in the topic, they can do more research themselves, like checking out the book the economist is covering in the article.

> (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.)

Most of them are bad reasons - for example, one very popular criticism is the claim that KJV invented the usage of the word "unicorn" in the Bible, and it's actually a wild ox. But it was traditionally translated that way from the time of the Latin Vulgate, and nobody knows for sure what a re'em is. [Ed - it turns out the Septuagint also uses the word μονοκερως, so it goes back even further.) So while it seems reasonable to personally disagree with the choice of word, it's going too far to declare it to be wrong when a) nobody knows what the referent is for sure b) the two pre-existing "canonical" translations have used your equivalent translation for ~1800 years.

You can find people explaining why not to use any translation; people are, uh, religious about their chosen translation and the KJV is the old guy you've got to tear down. But any mainstream translation is probably OK. You certainly miss out on a lot of poetry and historical citations if you skip out on the KJV, and there's very few actual problems with it. Probably the fairest criticism is the general decline in reading ability means that many people find the KJV hard to read, and the NKJV in that regard is only a minor improvement for modern audiences.

> You certainly miss out on a lot of poetry and historical citations if you skip out on the KJV, and there's very few actual problems with it.

Looking at the KJV's book of Revelation, it contains all the errors that Erasmus's Greek manuscript for the book of Revelation has. It's a terrible, and often invented, translation of that book. It's not just a few problems with a word here or there, it's part translation, and part some book which was invented some time in the 16th-17th century. (Meaning that some of the KJV book of Revelation was invented at that time - the actual book was probably written in the 1st century).

This is a huge overstatement of the problem, which generally refers to the last six verses of the book. Consider the comparison of the KJV with the NIV, which is based on a newer/modern critical Greek text. Eramus made up the missing verses by translating from the Vulgate. Otherwise the Greek variants that exist are defensible.

https://biblehub.com/akjv/revelation/22.htm https://biblehub.com/niv/revelation/22.htm

As you can see, it says "book" when it should say "tree."

You can compare KJV with the NIV and other editions. To say parts of the book were "invented" in the 16th century is going a few steps too far. It would be better to say that we now have a manuscript which we believe is probably better in that it is likely more faithful to the original...but which is not really substantially any different from the textus receptus. Revelation has very few Greek sources and they do contain variants, but precisely because of the lack of sources it's difficult to make strong claims about what is or isn't correct.

[Ed - and it looks like book vs life is also entirely defensible after googling it - if it is an error, it is a very very old error, dating back at least to the 300s, and book does make theological sense - it would be far from the only reference to the book of life.)

I was just mentioning the KJV as an example because it was mentioned in the article, but I guess that the same can be found about every English translation. I have a NASB translation at home that I used a long time when I still believed in the existence of the super-natural. I read through the Dutch NBG (from 1951) translation (Dutch being my mother tongue) and parts of the Staten Vertaling (the Dutch equivalent of the KJV), which by the way also had a substantial impact on the Dutch language, giving it some new words, but also influenced it grammar. Some of those influences have waned in the past decades. I am familiar with several other translations in Dutch. I understand that after the NBG translation the Dutch society for bible translations has produced two more translations.

I found Dan McCellans video [1] to be informative. Two of the biggest problems I took away from that video are:

1) KJV is based on later revisions of the text. Newer works are based on newer discoveries of older versions of the text, and so are closer to the original source text.

2) The differences with modern English usage can lead to very different readings from what the authors of KJV meant. A good example is given at about 19 minutes into the video.

[1] https://youtu.be/RRn-De2I6II

There’s even a KJV for Catholics now thanks to some Anglicans choosing to become Catholic.

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