Translating the Bible: Languages, Issues and Confusion

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Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness – Dante Alighieri
The main concern of translation is always to provide the very essence of the source text to the target language, which unfortunately is not fulfilled very often. If a translation should occur without destroying the sweetness of the text, it requires lot of hard work, expertise, patience and knowledge about the social settings, cultural significance and historical backgrounds of the source text. If the translator is an expert in these fields, then we could expect a more or less true translation; yet as Venutti points out that, “since no two languages are identical, there can be no absolute correspondence between languages. Hence, there can be no fully exact translations. The total impact of a translation may be reasonably close to the original, but there can be no identity in detail” (Venuti, 127). Thus all translations can be said as reasonably close to the original but it cannot be a true identical copy of the source text with all its...

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