tree_and_leaf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tree_and_leaf) wrote2011-03-15 08:47 pm
tree_and_leaf) wrote2011-03-15 08:47 pm
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I had my New Jerusalem Bible out early today to compare how a passage was translated (normally I use the NRSV, though the NJB's not bad, apart from its irritating habit of writing 'Yahweh' for the Divine Name, rather than 'the LORD'*). However: I was glancing through Job, as you do, and noticed they'd translated the names of Job's daughters.
So instead of Keren-happuch, we got:
Mascara.
Keren-happuch is not, perhaps, what the ear of a native English speaker would consider particularly beautiful, but still, I'm not convinced Mascara is an improvement. It sounds more like a Discworld joke than anything else (a wannabe teenage witch, possibly?)
* I wouldn't mind so much if they'd write YHWH, though even then you'd have the problem of people reading it out as 'Yahweh', and that seems wrong in the context of worship. If you want to remind people of the Jewish provenance of what we call the OT, great, but don't do it in such a religiously insensitive way.
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We now return you to our regular scheduled essay crisis (last one of term, yays!)
So instead of Keren-happuch, we got:
Mascara.
Keren-happuch is not, perhaps, what the ear of a native English speaker would consider particularly beautiful, but still, I'm not convinced Mascara is an improvement. It sounds more like a Discworld joke than anything else (a wannabe teenage witch, possibly?)
* I wouldn't mind so much if they'd write YHWH, though even then you'd have the problem of people reading it out as 'Yahweh', and that seems wrong in the context of worship. If you want to remind people of the Jewish provenance of what we call the OT, great, but don't do it in such a religiously insensitive way.
+++
We now return you to our regular scheduled essay crisis (last one of term, yays!)
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The NRSV's my default, because it's the standard translation used by the Church of England (and also generally by university theology departments); it's a well-done translation with sound scholarship behind it, and no egregious theological axes to grind (unlike the NIV), and it reads aloud well. The NJB is the Roman Catholic translation; it's also a good translation and it's phrasing seems to me to be often a bit closer to the Greek than the NRSV, though that sometimes means it reads less well.
The KJB sounds magnificent, of course, but it's not satisfactory for serious study, IMO - the translators didn't have the advantage of such good manuscripts, and the fact that the language is so remote from everyday speech removes it a bit too far from us for me to be happy using it as the default (though I would be happy to use it in worship in some situations).
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