Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You putting final polish on a Bible translation?
[00:00:04] Ouch.
[00:00:06] Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toych in my previous post, I mentioned how I started a full time research position for the new Revised standard Version in 1987 eightyat. I had several roles to play in that position. Probably the most difficult involved trying to make sure that there was a consistency in the translation from one biblical book passage and verse to another.
[00:00:34] How does one determine if a translation is internally consistent? It's not easy. I had to work through the entire translation, and whenever I came across a key term in the Hebrew or Greek that had been rendered into English in one way in one passage, I had to check whether it was rendered similarly in other passages where the same word occurred. I should stress that the translators were absolutely not bound and determined to translate the same Hebrew or greek word the same way every time it appeared in the Bible. In some contexts a word will be better translated one way, in others another. But they at least had to be aware of the fact that the term appears in various passages, and they had to be cognizant of how it had been translated each time.
[00:01:23] In many instances, a word will mean exactly the same thing in various contexts, and when that is the case, it should probably be translated the same way.
[00:01:33] One of the necessary problems with the NRSV translation committee, as I have pointed out, is that it involved several subcommittees for the Old Testament. As you probably know, the Old Testament is more than three times as long as the New Testament. And so there were three subcommittees working on different books of the Old Testament and only one for the New Testament. But the decisions of each of the subcommittees were made and recorded for that subcommittee and were not always taken into account by another subcommittee. What if the same verse or term is found in different books of the Bible, but different subcommittees translated to different books? This could lead to problems of consistency. If there was a concern, as ultimately there was to render similar passages, verses and words similarly in different parts of the Bible, how do you make sure that happens?
[00:02:27] I had to check verse by verse, word for word. This was made possible by the use of a computer. It was made difficult by the fact that this was a computer with rather primitive search possibilities made in 1986. I don't know if you remember those computer days, but they were not like today. Computers were slow and clunky. Software was relatively basic, search engines still in their somewhat infancy. And boy was that hard. And there was some considerable time pressure since the committee wanted the final version of the translation to go to the publishers by 1988. In effect. I made extensive lists of keywords, both Old Testament and New Testament, and checked throughout the entire Bible to find if they had been rendered consistently and if not, to make note of it and inform the final three person subcommittee putting the final touches on the translation so they could decide what to do with it. Ouch.
[00:03:30] Another challenging and related task I had at the same time involved checking the translation for consistency of style. There were certain decisions that had been made about english style that were to be implemented consistently, some of them broad and major issues, some of them dealing with fine points of grammar. Among the broad issues was the one I have mentioned, the decision of the committee to render the text into inclusive English with clear guidelines they had established. Someone from outside the committee had to make sure those guidelines had been followed. That would be me. I had to read through the entire translation and make sure that every passage was rendered inclusively. In view of the committee's decisions about inclusivity, there were places, lots of places, where a subcommittee had not implemented these decisions fully. All these had to be noted so the final committee could decide what to do. And there were lots of other stylistic decisions that had been made that needed to be followed. I had to note places where they had not been, just to give an example, one you would almost certainly not have thought of, it was deemed important to be consistent in the use of the english relative pronoun. Yep, the relative pronoun. Most people do not understand the difference between the relative pronouns which and that. My PhD students get it wrong all the time. So do most people. In established english usage, the relative which is nonrestrictive and the relative that is restrictive. It's hard at first to tell the difference. So let me illustrate. If you say the computer which is in the bedroom, it actually means something different from the computer that is in the bedroom. Really? The former sentence is not restricting the noun computer by telling you which computer you are talking about, it is telling you where the computer you are talking about is located. The latter sentence is restricting the noun computer by telling you which computer you are referring to, not the one in the kitchen or the living room, for example, but the one that is in the bedroom. See the difference? If you don't differentiate between the two pronouns, you can't always understand the meaning of a sentence. And so the committee had to have a consistent rule about how to use which nonrestrictive and that restrictive. The simple rule they adopted was this. If a pronoun is being used nonrestrictively, it will always be which, and it will always be preceded by a comma. If it is being used restrictively. It will always be that, and it will never be preceded by a comma. I had to check every which and that in the entire translation.
[00:06:17] There were lots of other things I had to check.
[00:06:20] It was an interesting year.
[00:06:23] It.
