Here's a good follow-up to my post about the Holman Christian Standard Bible, whose translation theory is "optimal equivalence," and which majors on using natural, normal English.
Wayne Leman discusses the importance of translating the bible into "natural English," which sounds strangely familiar to that old reformation era notion of a vernacular bible. Wayne notes that the use of unnatural language can have a powerful rhetorical effect, such as President Kennedy's famous line "ask not what your country can do for you." Wayne points out that it wouldn't have had the same rhetorical effect if it had begun "do not ask."
But, Wayne points out that overuse of the unnatural can have some unintended, deleterious (how's that for an "unnatural" word?) effects, and that translators need to be careful to take pains to translate into the natural usage of the receptor language and use the unnatural when the text calls for a rhetorical effect.
Overuse of anything, food, sex, blogging (!), whatever, can desensitize us to its intended effect. Overuse of unnatural wordings for rhetorical effect desensitizes us and a desired effect is lost. If English Bibles are filled with unnatural wordings, readers get from those Bibles the wrong sense about the messages they are reading. Instead of being intellectually or emotionally or volitionally challenged by the unnatural, the unusual, the unique turn of phrase, we become too familiar with them if they are overused. And familiarity can not only breed the proverbial contempt, but it can also create within readers a sense that God is distant, he doesn't talk our language, he isn't really interested in incarnation. And that is exactly the wrong message we want to have connoted by Bible translations. God not only incarnated himself to bring salvation to mankind, but he also incarnated messages he wanted communicated to mankind through normal human languages.
For the most part the wordings in the original biblical language texts were natural in those languages. It is proper for our translations to be natural, as well, if we want them to communicate the same way to people today as God wanted the original texts to communicate to their audiences thousands of years ago. If there is a passage in the Bible which was intended to convey some special rhetorical effect, it is at that point that translators can look for English forms which might adequately convey that effect. One option might be some unnatural wording.
Milton Stanley points out that Wayne's words apply to preaching as well.
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