Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] OT Translations

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] OT Translations
  • Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:52:47 -0700

On 10/06/2004 14:14, Bill Rea wrote:

...

To draw a parallel closer to our time, if my memory serves me correctly,
when Erasmus went to assemble a Greek NT he had to translate a few verses
from Latin back into Greek because there were no texts available. As Greek
texts have become available it should be possible to check his accuracy.
That should give us some indication of whether it is feasible to recover
a lost Hebrew text on the basis of the LXX.


For that matter, I would challenge anyone to take a passage from a Bible translation from Hebrew into English, or any other modern language, especially a translation which is not very literal, and translate it back into Hebrew without reference to the original (and assuming they haven't more or less memorised the original). I would be surprised if anyone today can come up with anything like the original text. Indeed in principle this is more or less impossible, because in any translation including this back-translation there will always be many choices to be made and in this scenario no guarantee that the choice made will match the original text.

Back translation from Latin to Greek is actually not a very good example because the languages are structurally quite similar. That would be more akin to back translation from Aramaic or Arabic to Hebrew. But English to Hebrew would be more comparable with Greek to Hebrew.

The lesson from this is that reconstruction of texts by back translation is a very dangerous pursuit, and one which should probably not be attempted unless there is something else to work with. When there is an apparently corrupt Hebrew text to compare with the Greek, there is something to work with, and so a chance of reconstructing a plausible Hebrew text which really corresponds to the Greek version. But in this case there is always a suspicion that what is being reconstructed is only the translator's way of making sense of an already corrupt Vorlage.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page