Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Peter:

When I hear "direct translation", most people are thinking of a word for word 
translation. For reasons discussed before, that is impossible.

But the question is: how much paraphrasing can be done before it crosses the 
line from merely making the ideas in one language understandable in another, 
as a subset of translation, to becoming an original work of art pushing its 
own ideas? All of us have seen examples of such misuse of paraphrase, where 
it has become the boss rather than the servant of translation, hence why we 
are so leery of "paraphrase".

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
>
> Fair enough. But none of them has the sense "inaccurate 
> translation" or "non-literal rendering from one language to 
> another" which Jim seems to use.
> 
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "direct translation", but if 
> you mean what Jim earlier called a translation rather than a 
> paraphrase, I would suggest that it almost always comes up 
> gibberish. A proper translation involves, as you say, rendering of 
> the meaning of the text in a form which gives an understandable 
> meaning in the target language, and in general this requires using 
> a different form in the target language.
> 
> But if you call that "paraphrase" you are distorting the meaning of 
> the word, although not as seriously as Jim was originally. In fact, 
> what you are saying is that translation is a subset of paraphrase, 
> and strictly according to your definition #1 that is true because 
> any change of language is a change of form. Nevertheless, the word 
> "paraphrase" is not normally used when a change of language is 
> involved, and it certainly does not imply non-literalism, still 
> less inaccuracy.
> 
> -- Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
-- 
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