Subject: Persistent Problems Confronting Bible Translators by Bruce M. Metzger
Bibliotheca Sacra 150: 599 (1993): 273-284.
[Reproduced by permission]
[Bruce M. Metzger is Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.]
[This is article three in the four-part series, "Translating the Bible: An Ongoing Task," delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4-7, 1992.]
The work involved in making a translation of the Bible is both exhilarating and exhausting. It is exhilarating when translators consider the benefits, both spiritual and literary, that the rendering will provide to their readers; it is exhausting when they confront various problems, some of them beyond the possibility of solution. Problems involved in translating the Scriptures are many. Some result from the presence of variant readings among the manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments. Others have to do with the meaning of rare words as well as the uncertainty of punctuation of the Hebrew and the Greek texts. Still others relate to the appropriate renderings in English or any other receptor language and bear on the choice of the literary level and style of phraseology.
