Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Spyros,

Looking through my in-box I found your post from 
April. As far as I can see, you got only one 
answer. I have written two books on Bible 
translation and  have translated many different 
documents from several Semitic languages into 
Norwegian. I can therefore make some comments on 
the basis of experience.

A fundamental translation principle is that a 
proper name, which refers to one particular 
person or to one particular place shall not be 
translated. Such a name should be transcribed 
according to the stock of phonemes of the target 
language. One possible (but not necessary) 
exception is when such a name is a part of a word 
play (cf. the sons of Isaiah) and there is no 
real reference.

When Bible translations render YHWH by "The Lord" 
and similar appellatives, the translators have 
violated this principle; they have taken 
something important away from the Bible text, and 
the readers are being lead astray. It can be 
compared to deleting the name "Jesus" from the 
New Testament, using appellatives instead of the 
name. That would also be a false representation 
of the original text.

The problem is that so many Bible translations do 
not use the personal name of God, and therefore 
it seems that this is a correct procedure. But, 
from the point of view of the laws and rules of 
applied linguistics, this is downright wrong!


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




> Dear members of the group,
>
> Since I am a translator of the Bible,
>  I wish to know your opinion:
>
> Is it correct to translate the
> "ineffable" strict name of God "YAHWEH" as "The Existing One"?
>
>
> If you agree, please show me scholar references and bibliography,
> mostly findable in the Internet.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Spyros
> Karalis
>
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