If you’re anything like me, you may regularly look up Scripture in more than one English translation, perhaps to get a fresh take on an otherwise familiar text, or maybe when a word in our most trusted English Bible seems strange or difficult to understand and we want to verify it in another trusted translation.

We who can read our Bibles in English are blessed with a variety of translations — many of them with very high quality standards — far beyond what readers of any other language can access. In fact, there are about 900 different translations of the whole or part of the Bible in English alone.

Even this avalanche of translations has a limitation, though, one that new translations still won’t be able to solve: these English translations are bound to the inherent constraints of our language — English.

If you have studied other languages — or if you’ve simply been exposed to other forms or dialects of English — you know there can be ways to express a certain reality, idea or feeling in one form of language that just isn’t readily available in another form of language. For example, as a parent, the British English term “dummy” felt much more appropriate and meaningful than the American English “pacifier.”

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