What does a translation consultant do? (Part 1)

(originally posted at wycliffe.ca on 2016-07-26)

Jeff writes: In this series, I'm going to give you glimpses into my day-to-day work checking Bible translation drafts. You can read Part 2 here.

Yesterday, I was checking Jonah. In the workshop we had in June, one of the issues we talked about was translating references to God in the Old Testament. The issues are a little different compared to the New Testament.

In the Old Testament, God is referred to in a number of ways. Some of the most common are:

• ’elohim, typically translated "God" English when referring to God, and translated "gods" or in other ways when referring to someone or something other than God,
• YHWH, typically translated "LORD" (in small caps) in English, and
• YHWH ’elohim, typically translated something like "LORD GOD" (in small caps) in English.

Some scholars believe that the authors/editors of the Old Testament were doing something deliberate when they chose from among these three options. It's a good idea in translation at least to distinguish between YHWH, which is a name, and ’elohim, which is a common noun. That is, translations should not collapse both into some word that means "God".

The translator I was checking Jonah for had been at the workshop, and he revised his draft of Jonah because of what he'd learned there. His earlier draft had "God" and "Lord God", like the New Testament. (It doesn't work to say "Lord" on its own in this language.) But after the workshop, he decided to translate YHWH as a name (which it is), using something that sounds like "Yahweh" in his language. So now the draft has a word that means "God" for ’elohim, and a word that sounds like "Yahweh" for YHWH. It was my job to check this change for consistency.

I did a search in the Hebrew of Jonah for the word YHWH. It occurs 26 times. I did a search in his draft, and found 21 occurrences of "Yahweh". That could be ok: sometimes in translation, you'll say "he" instead of someone's name, for the sake of naturalness. So I went verse by verse through each occurrence, and found two spots, Jonah 1:4 and 1:17, where "Yahweh" did not occur in the translation. 1:4 just had "God", and 1:17 had "Lord God". These weren't deliberate translation decisions for the sake of naturalness; they were mistakes. He'd simply missed updating these two spots. So I pointed this out to him, and he made the changes.

These are some of the things translation consultants do: we help teams think through their translation decisions, and then we help them be consistent.