Translating is always a tricky thing and when it comes to translating the Bible the trickiness goes to a whole new level of difficult. The trick is to find the right balance between literally translating the words and freely translating the meaning. If we’re too far on the literal side the translation will be confusing and hard to understand for the native speaker. But, if we’re too far on the other side, our translation can become more of a commentary than an accurate translation. Now, let’s translate!
Meme bǝ okak tegǝlop. ‘Meme bǝ’ means ‘that thing’. ‘Okak’ means ‘arm’ or ‘hand’. ‘Te-‘ means ‘short’. ‘-gǝl-’ means ‘become’, and ‘-op’ means ‘for’. So a literal translation is ‘That thing is for making your arm short.’
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but maybe it does to you. Actually, if you think about it for a minute you might be able to come up with what is really being said. Ready?
“That thing is unreachable.”
So what does this mean for us and Bible translation? What we aim for is communicating only and completely what is communicated in the original passage. So we take a passage of Scripture, whether a chapter or verse or phrase, and whatever is communicated in that passage, that is what we want to communicate in our translation; no more and no less. Sometimes it may take twice as many words but we believe that if we’re not clearly communicating what the passage says, we’re not doing our job.
And there’s our translation thought for the day!