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The Importance of Meaning
The people who wrote the Bible had messages from God that God wanted people to understand. These original writers used the language that their people spoke so that they and their people could understand God’s messages. God wants people today to understand those same messages. But people today do not speak those languages that the Bible was written in long ago. So God has given us the task of translating the Bible into the languages that people speak today.
The particular language that people use to communicate God’s messages is not important. The specific words that are used are not important. What is important is the meaning that those words communicate. The meaning is the message, not the words or the language. What we must translate, then, is not the words or the forms of the sentences of the source languages, but the meaning.
Look at the pairs of sentences below.
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It rained all night. / Rain fell all night.
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John was very surprised when he heard the news. / The news very much amazed John when he heard it.
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It was a hot day. / The day was hot.
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Peter’s house / The house that belongs to Peter
You can see that the meaning of each pair of sentences is the same, even though they use different words. This is the way it is in a good translation. We will use different words than the source text, but we will keep the meaning the same. We will use words that our people understand and use them in a way that is natural for our language. Communicating the same meaning as the source text in a clear and natural way is the goal of translation.
Credits: Example sentences from Barnwell, pp. 19-20, (c) SIL International 1986, used by permission.