The Lolcatz Bible?

I have a dozen costly Gitas lying around in the house. No one's even opened the wrap. I can give you those if I come to Ireland anytime soon.

Animavore wrote:
I have a Gideon Bible I got from a hotel,

Thou shalt not fucking steal.

Animavore wrote:Just one will do. I can't read your language, whatever that is

They are translated ones and mostly interpretations.

The Gita has some cool advices. Non-scientific but like those management books but useful in some real life situations.

“Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed.”

"Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives."

“Thou hast power only to act not over the result thereof. Act thou therefore without prospect of the result and without succcumbing to inaction."

“Perform your obligatory duty, because action is indeed better than inaction.”

But you have to work hard to separate the crap from the rest.

Animavore wrote:Just like the Bible

Absolutely. The Bible has some awesome quotes! I know only two though. "let there be light" and another one about "ask and it shall be given" or something like that.

Animavore wrote:Which is the best translation?
I have a Gideon Bible I got from a hotel, not sure what translation it is, all I do know is that it is written to poorly for me to read. It's like a bloody 6 year-old wrote it.

The Gideons Bibles are usually either King James Version or New King James. The first was translated nearly 400 years ago and so isn't exactly at the cutting edge of linguistic or textual research. The latter was translated in 1979 but only using the manuscripts and texts available in 1611 (due to a kooky fundamentalist Protestant superstition that these are the ones God somehow wants us to use). Neither is a good modern translation.

Jason David BeDunh's Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament undertakes a systematic comparison of key difficult texts in nine different translations: The King James Version (KJV), The Amplified Bible (AB), The Living Bible (LB), The New American Bible (NAB), The New American Standard Bible (NASB), The New International Version (NIV), The New World Translation (NW), The (New) Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and Today’s English Version (TEV). Rather surprisingly, he found the New World Translation - produced by the Jehovah's Witnesses - was the most accurate.

This is because (i) the JWs put a lot of emphasis on basing their beliefs on the text as it stands, not translating the text with any theology in mind and (ii) the JWs are non-Trinitarians. That means that passages that are usually mistranslated in standard editions to prop up the idea that Jesus was God are left translated as they actually read in the Greek. And they don't support the idea that Jesus was part of some kind of "Trinity" at all.

For a non-JW edition that does much the same thing, try Andy Gaus The Unvarnished New Testament. Gaus is a scholar of Greek who strips the NT of all the centuries of theology and simply tries to reproduce not only what the Greek says but something like the fairly unpolished and rough style and colloquialism of the NT texts.

Hope that helps.

Animavore wrote:Probably a long shot, but does anyone know of the best Koran, Toa Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita/Upanishads translations? I'm trying to get a bit of a collection going.

Koran:

* Abdel Haleem, M. A. S., trans. The Qur'an: A New Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Tao Te Ching:

* LaFargue, Michael, trans. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary. New York: State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 1992.

TimONeill wrote:
The Gideons Bibles are usually either King James Version or New King James. … Neither is a good modern translation.

I'm not a philologist but I still like and use the good old King James Version.

The question of which is the best bible translation is quite complicated. In English there is an enormous variety of translations, with new ones being produced seemingly every year. It could be argued that this offers English readers an advantage – multiple versions can be checked against each other if any particular reading is suspect.

Most translation activity these days seems to be dominated by evangelical fundamentalists. But there is still variety in the market. I would suggest a few principles:

Ancient or modern?
Modern translations are better than old ones, unless you’re interested in historical literary considerations, when the King James Version (KJV) still reigns supreme. This is because:

1. Our understanding of biblical languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) has improved enormously,
2. Newer translations are based on better quality manuscripts and texts – i.e. those with fewer scribal errors and alterations,
3. The English language has changed down the centuries, and a significant amount of what is written in, say, the KJV is now unintelligible or potentially misleading for readers of modern English.

A few modern translations have, on the basis of dogma, decided that the KJV was best, but have updated the language, e.g. New King James Version (NKJV), Revised Authorised Version (RAV). They thus keep the worst of both worlds – inferior texts yet not the beautiful Elizabethan English.

Just words?
Translations tend to fit on a spectrum between word-for-word (known as formal correspondence) and meaning-for-meaning (you’ll see terms such as dynamic equivalence or functional equivalence used to describe these). People often mistakenly believe that only the former are “accurate”. In fact it is normally much better to understand correctly the meaning of a text rather than have equivalent words presented which mean nothing or are potentially misleading.

Recognising this principle would make meaning-for-meaning translations far superior, but this has to be offset by the decision making process involved: someone has to decide for every phrase what is the meaning to be translated and how to convey it, thus risking the introduction of bias. Word-for-word translations can be a bit more mechanistic about this, but this doesn’t entirely remove opportunity for bias. Really it is best to have access to two translations – one from each end of the spectrum.

Versions towards the formal correspondence end of the spectrum include the New American Standard Version (NASB), New World Translation (NWT), New American Bible (NAB – particularly later editions). Those towards the meaning-for-meaning end include the Good News Bible (GNB), Revised English Bible (REB) and New Jerusalem Bible (NJB).

There are some translations that take a middle road; in fact this seems to be becoming increasingly popular, and probably started with the New International Version (NIV), which had a phenomenal success, almost undoutedly not because of this middle-of-the-road approach, but instead because it was an evangelical fundamentalist translation that was produced at an opportune moment for evangelical fundamentalism. Since this time others have tried to copy the success by adopting the same translation approach, all failing dismally to match the NIV’s sales figures.

Some have stated that they’re not really middle-of-the-road, rather they have adopted a third approach: being word-for-word as much as they can and adopting a meaning-for-meaning approach at point where it would be misleading to maintain formal correspondence. Don’t be fooled by this “3rd way”; it’s basically the same as every middle-of-the-road translation has been doing – indeed really every translation does this to some extent, wherever it positions itself on the spectrum.

In addition to the NIV, translations adopting a middle-of-the-road approach include the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), New Living Translation (NLT), and Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB).

Who were the translators?
This may seem like a silly question, but it is important that translators are qualified for the task, and preferably that there is a sufficient number of them so that the work of individuals is scrutinised by peers. Furthermore, if translation committees consist of translators of different backgrounds and beliefs there will be reduced opportunity for sectarian bias. Until very recently no translation committee included any women (outside an administrative/secretary role) thus giving rise to certain sexist howlers.

Translations by individuals may well have interesting aspects to them but they’re unlikely to satisfy across the board. For this reason it is probably best to avoid Ronald Knox’s Translation, Young’s Literal Translation and J.B. Philips (NT, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah only).

There are many translations completed by committees who have a very restricted background/system of belief. Evangelical fundamentalists who hold to the infallibility/inerrancy of the protestant bible publish an inordinate number of translations these days. They distort their translations to preserve this doctrine (and others, such as the divinity of Jesus). Members of this group include a number I’ve already mentioned (NASB, NIV, HCSB) plus others that seem to roll off the presses with alarming alacrity.

Catholics used to have some of the worst bible translations known to humanity (e.g. the Douay-Rheims), but recently have been doing much better. Of course they still suffer to a certain extent from the committee all belonging to one denomination, but I generally feel they at least attempt a degree of objectivity entirely absent from the evangelical fundamentalists. They probably represent a wider spread of belief than their counterparts. The NJB and NAB are roman catholic translations, and you’ll see below that I’d particularly recommend the NJB. Unfortunately the revision currently underway of the NJB seems to be taking a few steps backwards.

The NWT is produced by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (JWs). They refuse to disclose who the translators were (this information has leaked out) claiming that this is so their work is simply to the glory of god. The real reason is, of course, that the committee was made up of self-taught amateurs. It is one of the most word-for-word translations that money can buy (painfully so in places), however you won’t actually need much money to buy it – it’s incredibly cheap, at least it was 25 years ago when I got my copy, about ¼ the price of any comparable translation. You have to ask a visiting JW for a copy (they’ll come back with one) or attend a kingdom hall event. It does contain some interesting readings, and I certainly wouldn’t write it off. I suspect it would score well in any survey that valued mechanical formal correspondence, and I wonder if that’s why it came top in the study Tim mentioned above.

Translations by committees with the widest backgrounds include the NRSV and REB. The NRSV tends to be used in theological/biblical studies circles.

Other considerations
There are a multitude of things to consider, and I couldn’t possibly list them all. Here are some:

Use of footnotes. You always lose in translation. You can make up some lost ground by use of footnotes. Some translations seem to have a pathological aversion to footnotes, and others overwhelm you with them. This feature is not always translation dependent, that is, even within one translation you can often find different editions with differing quantities of footnotes.

The tetragrammaton represents a particular scandal in bible translation, or should I say “deliberate mistranslation”. Really there is no inherent difficulty here. In the Hebrew bible god has a particular name which is used 6,828 times in the Masoretic Text, making it by far the most common name in the bible and one of the most common words. Despite this, in most English translations it is systematically replaced by a word which is not signified by the name at all. In Hebrew the name is יהוה which transliterates to the letters Yhwh in English – Hebrew was originally written largely without vowels, but by far the majority of Hebraists agree that this word originally was pronounced “Yahweh”. Despite the fact that “Yahweh” was clearly freely used in all parts of the Hebrew bible except late compositions, at some point during second temple Judaism a superstition arose that no-one should pronounce this name. Instead jews replaced the name Yahweh with אֲדֹנָי (adonay) meaning “lord” when they read aloud from the bible.

This superstition has been taken on by the vast majority of bible translators (christian or jewish) who refuse to pronounce “Macbeth” – oops – “Yahweh” and instead print LORD (i.e.in small CAPS). This completely distorts the bible; reading it through like this gives a falsely reverential feel that the original simply doesn’t possess; it goes a long way to eliminating an anthropomorphic feel that the original does possess. Personally I suspect they do this because they are embarrassed that their religion is so primitive that god has a name. They thus stupidly hand a small victory to the JWs who render the name “Jehovah” in the NWT (“Jehovah” comes from a latinization of a combination of Yhwh and adonay, so they’re not entirely free of this superstition either).

Very few translations actually translate the tetragrammaton correctly. One which does is the NJB. Unfortunately superstition still reigns, and the revision of this translation will revert to the mistranslation of the majority of its peers. The HCSB does use “Yahweh” 75 times (the KJV used “Jehovah” 4 times) but this begs the question, if they can do it correctly 75 times why can’t they do it for the other 6,828 - 75 = 6,753 occasions?

The canons of the bible used by various churches differ. Protestants and jews have pretty much the same old testament or Hebrew bible. Roman catholics include more works in their old testament and eastern orthodox churches tend to have even more. Not all translations contain these “extra” (sometimes known as “apocryphal” or “deutero-canonical”) books. Catholic translations obviously contain their canon, and they tend to order them following the order adopted by some manuscripts of an early Greek translation of the Hebrew bible – the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). You can sometime buy editions of the bible that contain the deutero-canonical works grouped together between the old testament and the new, e.g. some editions of the NRSV and REB contain this section.

Some recommendations
Well I’ve already hinted that the NJB is one of my favourites. It was one of the first to attempt gender inclusiveness, which is not altogether a consistent success. I guess it’s the thought that counts. It’s particularly strong on poetry, abandoning the KJV’s Elizabethan cadences for a more up-to-date feel. It’s written in a proper book format (at least in some editions) and it’s available in a version with a good selection of footnotes and introductory material.

The NASB is probably my favourite formal correspondence version. Translated by evangelical fundamentalists, it has its faults. One thing I hate about it is that it prints each verse in its own paragraph (at least in the edition I have) which makes it hard to keep the flow as you read it. This flaw also encourages its readers to use it for proof-texting: selecting a verse to show a pet theory must be true. Nevertheless, as a word-for-word version it has stood the test of time, and you’ll never find a perfect translation.

The REB is another possibility for a meaning-for-meaning translation. Undoubtedly some good scholarship here, it’s less avant garde than its predecessor the New English Bible (NEB), but it retains a fluent feel to it.

If you want to argue with biblical critics then you’ll need a copy of the NRSV. Personally I suspect that the NRSV succeeded in these circles simply because its forerunner, the Revised Standard Version (RSV) was previously the standard formal correspondence translation in the same circles. The NRSV went much more mid-spectrum, and in my view really doesn’t deserve its position here; unless you keep checking it against the Hebrew or Greek text you have no idea which end of the spectrum applies in each phrase. Biblical critics would be much better off sticking to the original languages or adopting a proper formal correspondence translation again.

I’d recommend getting a couple of translations if you can afford it – that way you can really check things out, just make sure the versions are very different from each other. Many of these versions are available on the internet, but personally I always find reading a real book easier than reading a lengthy work on the internet.

If you really want to understand art, music and literature in depth, you must read the KJV. Doesn't matter what you believe or don't believe.

One word of caution about NWT that Jehovah's witness use. I have heard quie a bit of criticism about it. particularly of the New Testament I have read accusations of theological bias and accusations that some of the people on the (anonymous) committee that translated it were not qualified to do so. I have no idea how much of this is true Im just telling what ive read and heard.

All things being equal the English Standard Version is a nice mix of accuracy and readability.