What does a translation consultant do? (Part 2)

(originally posted on 2016-08-22)

This post is part of a series on Jeff’s work as a translation consultant. Read Part 1 here.

Bible translation is hard work. Before you translate something, you have to understand it, and the Bible can be hard to understand. Even one of its authors says so (2 Peter 3:15-16)!

Translators need to use all the resources they can to understand what they’re translating. Without outside help, it can be easy for any of us to import our own ideas into the Bible and assume it means one thing when it really means another. Translators are trained to interpret the Bible, but some get more training than others. Consultant-checking evens things out by ensuring that someone outside the project, someone with a certain level of ability at interpreting the Bible, evaluates each translated verse.

I was checking a translation of Leviticus into a language of the Asian highlands. Leviticus 12:4 says that after a woman has given birth to a son, "Her time of blood purification shall be thirty-three days" (NRSV). The Hebrew reads more like the ESV: "Then she shall continue for thirty-three days in the blood of her purifying", but the verb "continue" means "remain" or even "dwell". In other words, the Hebrew is a little hard to understand here (like the ESV!).

The translation I was checking said, "For a woman, after giving birth to the child, in order that her flow of blood become clean, she has to remain at home for thirty-three days." I made a note to the team about the "flow of blood becom[ing] clean" part, and pointed them to the excellent NET Bible footnote on that issue. (See note #8 in Leviticus 12.) That's not the point of this post.

What I found interesting was the "remain at home" part. Where did that come from?

The Hebrew word can mean "stay" or "live" somewhere, but it wouldn't normally mean something as specific as "stay home" without more help from the context. So, "remain at home" isn't just some other equally-valid way to read the Hebrew; it isn't that at all. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing hard to understand about this part of the verse: the Hebrew says nothing about staying home. This idea must have come into the translation from somewhere else.

In the country where most of the readers of this translation live, there's a custom that a woman stays home and does not even shower, bathe, or wash her hair after childbirth for 30 days. She can't eat raw fruits or vegetables or drink coffee or cold drinks; she has to wear socks all the time (to keep from "catching a cold"!). Nobody in that culture would notice anything unusual about a translation of Leviticus that says women need to stay home after childbirth.

I don't think that the ethnic minority that this translation is for traditionally had this practice, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've picked it up from the majority culture, or even had majority-culture doctors insist on it.

I looked at five Bible translations in the national language of that country. The ones used most by the majority-culture church there, three of the five, all also translated Leviticus 12:4 to say "stay home". The other two, more contemporary translations, interpreted it more like English translations do: she "stays" or "remains" in a certain state for that length of time.

So the translation I was checking had imported the meaning "stay home" from the national-language translations and from the majority culture. How often do we read ideas into the Bible because we expect it to match our way of thinking? Probably more than we realize.

I wrote a note about this for the team, directing them to read the NET footnote to understand the situation, and recommending that they remove the words "at home" and adjust the verb they'd chosen so that it doesn't imply that the woman has to stay home for those thirty-three days.