Wayne Leman poses one of his regular questions about Bible translation. This time, however, he made me think of a different question, which I’ve left in the comments over there.
His main point (leading to a question about preferences):
In Bible translation courses we are taught to word a translation using the natural patterns of the language into which we are translating. One of the principles of this approach to translation is that a translation should not sound like a translation. It should sound like it was originally written in the translation language.
And what I think is the more interesting question I asked him:
What happens, though, when the source language is unnaturally stilted by the grammatical forms of another one? I’m thinking of the presence of various semitisms in the Greek NT. It’s not a natural pattern in the source language; should it be rendered as a natural pattern in the target language?
Update 23:20 See Wayne’s lengthy response over on the original post. This is indeed an interesting question.
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