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Artículo en Christianity Today: ¿Cómo se traduce ‘lleno del Espíritu Santo’?

La escena bíblica del día de Pentecostés nos permite ver a un Dios que entiende que el idioma va más allá de la mera comunicación.

Tan solo unos días después de la muerte y resurrección de Cristo, el Espíritu Santo fue enviado, y con Él, la capacidad de los apóstoles de hablar en otras lenguas. Los visitantes presentes en ese lugar, que habían viajado de lugares tan lejanos como Irak, Libia e Italia, de pronto pudieron escuchar el mensaje del evangelio en sus lenguas maternas. Escuchar sobre Jesús de esta forma tan profundamente cercana sorprendió y maravilló a la audiencia en Jerusalén y produjo una certeza profunda sobre la veracidad de la misión que Jesús había encarnado. (El hecho de que estos visitantes probablemente pudieran entender el griego o el arameo, las lenguas predominantes en Jerusalén en ese tiempo, remarca esto).

Puede leer el resto del artículo aquí .

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Integration into STEP Bible

You can now find a link to the Translation Insights & Perspectives data for every verse in the Bible right from within the STEP Bible (stepbible.org) interface. Just click on the verse number and you will see “See Translation TIPS” listed in the lower right-hand corner of the resulting popup window.

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Newly designed website for TIPs

We are so pleased to announce that the website for the Translation Insights & Perspectives tool (“TIPs”) has gone through a thorough redesign.

The goals of the redesign included

  • a more intuitive and informative homepage, which now includes a selection of the most popular insights within TIPs and a selection of video-based user testimonies;
  • a tie-in with local Bible societies, with prompts for TIPs users to visit the national or regional society’s website when they first visit the TIPs site; and
  • easy ways to locate data by Bible verse, keyword, or category.

With close to 50,000 individual and often very extensive records within TIPs, users from across the world are now arriving on the TIPs site via many different pages. To help orient and direct those users, the site now contains consistent messaging and guidance on every page.

TIPs came online in 2018 as a collection of translations of key biblical terms that create a clearer understanding of how those concepts are understood across languages and cultures. The target audience for TIPs was twofold: on the one hand, anyone interested in the Bible and the multilingual church; on the other hand, Bible translators who could use those examples in their important work. At its inception, it seemed far-fetched to ever have enough data for every single verse in the Bible or to get beyond the data of a couple hundred languages.

It is with a great sense of gratitude that while still pursuing those target audiences and creating the same multilingual understanding of the Bible, today there is indeed data for every verse in the Protestant, Catholic, and most Orthodox canons. The data now includes

Overall, examples of more than 900 languages have been recorded and documented.

TIPs offers a tremendous opportunity for Bible societies or other translation agencies to engage supporters by linking to tips.translation.bible or by including some of TIPs’ data in their own websites via our API. We are grateful for any suggestions and questions and are eager to help you use the ever-growing treasures in TIPs for your own purposes.

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Article on Bible Gateway: The Temptation of Jesus in the Bibles of the World

After Jesus had entered the water, God’s Sacred Breath entered Jesus to fill and indwell him, so he followed his voice into an area where all noise was cut off. He went without food to worship for as many days and nights as two people have digits, and his hunger ate him. There his soul was tested by the head of the worldlings.

Does this sound vaguely familiar? You may recognize the passage as the first two verses of the fourth chapter of Luke — the beginning of one account of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, but it’s been translated with an amalgamation of terminology from eleven different languages that renders a recognizable story strange and somewhat startling.

Some terminology might seem curious to English speakers, but these phrases are all drawn from real Bibles read by and for real people with real Christian faith.

This familiar story of Jesus’s temptation is told in all three of the synoptic gospels and holds a special place in how we view and think of Jesus, especially at this time of year during the 40-day season of Lent when many of us also fast or undertake other spiritual practices.

Read the rest of the article on Bible Gateway .

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Article on Bible Gateway: Finding the Full Meaning of Scripture in the Treasure Chest of Bible Translation

“English readers are blessed when it comes to Bible translations.”

This statement on its own could mean several different things. It could mean that Bibles translated into English are better than those translated into other languages. Another possible meaning could be that English as a language is more qualified than other languages to express the meaning of the Bible. Or it might mean that there are a lot more translations in English than in any other language.

It might be disappointing for some to hear it, but the first and second explanations are simply not true. There are excellent English translations of the Bible, and there are excellent translations in other languages. English is equally equipped to translate the original languages — and equally limited in finding just the right words — as other languages around the world.

The third explanation is true, though. No language has produced as many different translations of the Christian scriptures as English. Bible Gateway has dozens of the most popular English versions — and even that barely scratches the surface of the 900 or so partial or complete English translations.

In addition to this embarrassment of riches, yet another resource for readers of English ties in with the first and second reasons to emphasize how our cup overflows.

See the rest of this article right here .

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Lectionary in The Christian Century: Genesis 45:1–15; Psalm 133

It echoed throughout my childhood: my mother’s exasperated voice, entreating my brother and me to stop our constant fighting before it cut years from her harried life. She was right on one of those assertions and wrong on another: my brother and I did indeed fight a lot, but he and I will gather peacefully in Hamburg, Germany, this year to celebrate her 80th birthday with her, so she was happily wrong about the life-shortening consequences of that bickering.

Having siblings can be a uniquely rich experience, but growing up with those same siblings can be hard. Very hard.

In many languages, including English and biblical Hebrew, the same word is used for biological siblings as for those who are deeply united in a cause, such as fellow Israelites serving the Lord or fellow Christian believers in the New Testament. The biblical text contains ample testimony to both the pitfalls and the thrills of forging that outward union into an inward unity.

“How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” The first line of Psalm 133—likely sung as people from across Israel made their way to Jerusalem for the High Holy Days—can evoke either jubilation about a unity and togetherness that is firmly in place or a pleading reminder that much needs to be done to achieve that unity.

Either way, the rewards the psalmist mentions are tremendous.

It’s like the soothing, healing, fragrant oil from above that runs down the hair, through the beard, and onto the robe of Aaron, where it pools on his chest plate containing the 12 stones that represent Israel’s tribes. (In both Spanish and Catalan Sign Language, Aaron’s name is signed by pointing to where the stones on his chest plate would be.) It’s also like the metaphoric covering of the whole land with life-giving, refreshing moisture, all the way from Mount Hermon in the far north to Jerusalem in the south.

Complete unity. Oneness, given from above.

See the rest of the lectionary with data from the Translation Insights & Perspectives tool right here.

For another perspective on the same text see Forgive and Forget?

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The Language of Faith: Bible translation throughout the centuries (article in MultiLingual magazine)

As a working translator, I knew that a “perfect” translation is neither a goal nor a possible reality. I knew that complete and linear transfer of form and meaning between two languages is not achievable, no matter how closely languages might be related. Like all translators, I knew that there is always something “lost in translation” (the favorite trope of journalists writing about anything related to translation). But I also knew that successful translation is still possible because so much can be gained in translation as well.

It’s in the balance between the two that a translation is successful. Since linear and complete transfer from one language to another is unattainable and therefore not a desirable goal, translators try to generate a text that becomes equivalent in its expressive force and meaning by transformation, by inevitably adding changed and new elements.

What if, I imagined, I could build a database to document those changed and new elements that have made their way into some, and maybe eventually all, of the 3,000+ languages into which the Bible has been translated? What if I could collect a listing of those fascinating terms, phrases, and constructs, and then go a step further to associate each with an explanation or a story or a back-translation into English so that they were actually accessible?

See the rest of this article in MultiLingual magazine right here.

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Article in Baptist News Global: How to read the Bible through the eyes of thousands of languages

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.”

See the rest of this article right here .