Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
I have been the senior translator for the NASB (and Scholar in Residence) at the Lockman Foundation for about two decades, and Edward Andrews and I are good friends who share a passion for literal Bible translation.
It may not take much to convince you of the premise of this chapter. The Bible is, after all, the Bible. But literal translation has no claim to priority unless the individual words of the Bible are very important.
For some time now terms ending in the word “equivalent” or one of its variations have been preferred in describing translation philosophies. I have a problem with this word, and all translators really should have the same problem with it: it begs the very question we are debating.
While I cannot address this subject at length, it needs to be addressed, to lay the foundation for you, the reader. My approach here is to assume that you have no knowledge of Bible translation issues, or the process of translating from the Original Languages (OL) of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, into what we call the Receptor Language (RL), such as English. However, this does not mean that we will pass over all the elements of this subject because some of them are essential to the issues of literal translation.
