> I am strongly in favor of your principle to let the reader "figure it
> out," perhaps helping by suggesting allowable alternatives via
> footnotes. We must also keep in mind that the reader does not understand
> Koine grammar and there are grammatical considerations to bear in mind
> beyond a word-for-word translation. Is it proper to not notify the
> reader that near context is having an effect on the present form verb?
> We do want to give them a literal translation that is more than an
> interlinear, do we not? It seems to me that your translation principles
> are to present more of an interlinear if we do not translate the effect
> of temporal clauses on the verb. Do I understand you properly?
Wes ~
Here is the problem that people are having with their Bibles: There
are virtually hundreds of them, each a different version, everywhere
one looks. Folks think they understand a passage, only to find that
it say different things according to which version of it one is
reading. They want to know God's Word, and to grow in It, and are
receiving a lot of different 'bibles'... And so they give up on the
English 'translations', and head to the Greek... And what will they
find there? What can we give them? How can we help? Do we help when
we tell them that after 5-10 years of dedicated effort they will be
able to read it in Greek? They won't have time... We are so blessed
to have or have had that kind of time to dedicate.
They need a really good interlinear, completely parsed, and a really
good very literal translation to go along with it, and they need a
real basic concordance, and they need a really simplified grammar that
can help them with the meanings of the parsings and sentence
constructions. They will already have 'good' translations in their
possession, probably more than 10 of them, each differing from the
other. They just want to know what the Greek SAYS, and not what a
Greek would have said had he been writing in English.
And they'll need a good, basic, cheap lex. Zhodiates comes closest to
date. He traces word derivations and some associations, giving basic
root meanings, then their implicative contextual meanings. It's
included in the back of his parallel text, but no interlinear.
Footnotes would help.
Such a text would be challenging and productive to them, for they
could puzzle their way through troublesome passages with a
confic=dence born of knowing that they had the 'wooden structure' that
underlies all the various 'versions' that are so confounding for
them. They might even decide to learn the language!!
The world does NOT need another 'translation' of the Bible ~ It needs
the BIBLE...
How can we help??
George Blaisdell