Translation and Interpretations, Are They Really Different?

All we see, we do according to our experiences, therefore when we read a book we may not completely get the message the author wanted us to get  because we see according to what we have lived. With King James’ Bible it is possible that the translation of the book was but an interpretation of it? I would say that this is very possible. When you translate something from one language to another you try to pass the meaning and not the exact words for most likely there are none that fit the situation specially with Greek and Hebrew (which unlike Latin based languages they aren’t as similar to English as Spanish or French are.) which most likely don’t have direct translation for words into English but rather the translators tried to take the meaning from the words.

This explains why the historical context in which the bible was written was so important. It explains what the majority of English men felt including scholars. Because of this we can understand to some limited extent (We would have to actually live the situation in order to completely understand what it felt to be an English scholar at a time.) what the translators felt and calculate how this affected the bible. Because of this, although this bible is one of the most neutral ones, it does reflect what the translators were living at the time. Yes there were corrections and other proof reading processes to try and avoid these to some extent but since they were all living in the similar situations a great amount of these interpretations probably went through to the final copy. Naturally if it’s a single person doing this job most likely a greater amount of his interpretations will pass on.

These Intellectuals had another job on them, they had to make the bible as the king wanted to make it suitable for the Job. This bible was meant to be used for the most ignorant and poor of Englishmen. As said in God’s Secretaries “The English sentences were being prepared for others, the non-educated, who had no access to the essence of the text which there scholars, like Bois, had been drinking in for decades. The English, in other words, was itself subservient to the original Greek.”(p.210) This meant that they had to simplify the essence of the text to the less educated people, make it simple, basically, “if it sounds right, it is right”(p.209). It was made so that people listening to it on the Sermons though as if it were the true words of god and because of these we can’t assume it to be an exact translation. They probably changed the meaning of words or phrases slightly to make them fit in to this.

Finally, when we translate are we saying what the author wanted to express or what we think he wanted to say? Is a completely accurate translation possible?