The Greek that is translated in English as “full armor” or similar is translated in Copainalá Zoque as “full metal suit.” (Source: William Wonderly in The Bible Translator 1953, p. 14ff. )
these are not drunk
The Greek that is translated as “these are not drunk” or similar in English had to be translated in Tzotzil as “We (excluding you) are not drunk.” A literal translation would be inferring that Peter had not received the Holy Spirit along with the rest who were present in the upper room. (Source: Marion Cowan in The Bible Translator 1962, p. 90)
very short
The Hebrew that is translated “very short” or similar in English is translated in Gbaya with the ideophone ŋgólók which can be used to describe a very short amount of time.
Philip Noss (in The Bible Translator 1976, p. 100ff. ) explains: “A descriptive device common to Gbaya oral literature that is often found in translations of the Psalms is the ideophone. The ideophone may be identified with onomatopoeia and other sound words frequently seen in French and English comic strips, but in Gbaya and other African languages it comprises a class of words with a very wide range of meaning and usage. They may function verbally, substantively, or in a modifying role similar to adverbs and adjectives. They describe anything that may be experienced: action, sound, color, quality, smell, or emotion. In oral literature they are used not only with great frequency but also with great creativity.
Conforming to Gbaya literary style, the team used ideophones in its translation of the Psalms, although an average of less than two per psalm is a considerably lower rate of occurrence than in Gbaya narrative. There were two reasons for this limited usage. The first was that the Psalms are poetry rather than action narrative where their occurrence would be more common. The second was that in a tale being performed for artistic reasons, the ideophone may predominate over the action, whereas in the psalm the ideophone must complement without dominating or overshadowing the message. However, since the ideophone is an integral part of Gbaya literary expression, it could not be omitted. To do so would have rendered the translation colorless and unliterary.”
buying / selling
The Greek that is translated as “buying” and “selling” in English is both translated in Ulithian as “exchange.” Stephen Hre Kio (in The Bible Translator 1987, p. 246f. ) explains: “There are buyers and sellers in the Temple whom Jesus drove away. But Ulithians do not buy or sell; they only exchange. And so we have ‘exchange’ for both buying and selling.”
deny oneself
The Greek that is translated with “deny himself” or “deny oneself” is according to Bratcher / Nida “without doubt one of the most difficult expressions in all of Mark to translate adequately.” These are many of the (back-) translations:
- Tetelcingo Nahuatl: “not accept self”
- Amganad Ifugao and South Bolivian Quechua: “forget self”
- North Alaskan Inupiatun: “have no regard for oneself”
- Toraja-Sa’dan: “not bother oneself about oneself”
- Huautla Mazatec: “cover up oneself”
- San Miguel El Grande Mixtec: “not worship oneself”
- Tzeltal: “stop doing what one’s own heart wants”
- Yaka: “let go that which he wants to do oneself”
- Cashibo-Cacataibo: “say, I will not do just what I want to do”
- Tzotzil: “say, I do not serve for anything” (in the sense of having no personal value)
- Sapo: “not do what is passing through one’s mind”
- Central Mazahua: “not take constant thought for oneself”
- Tabasco Chontal: “quit what one wants”
- Highland Totonac: “undo one’s own way of thinking”
- Dan: “put one’s own things down”
- Kekchí: “despise oneself”
- Kituba: “refuse oneself”
- Javanese: “turn one’s back on oneself”
- Southern Bobo Madaré: “disobey oneself” (in the sense of denying one’s own wishes)
- Huastec: “leave oneself at the side”
- Chicahuaxtla Triqui: “leave one’s own way”
- Loma: “take one’s mind out of oneself completely”
- Panao Huánuco Quechua: “say, I do not live for myself”
- Mitla Zapotec: “say No to oneself” (source for this and all above: Bratcher / Nida)
- Copainalá Zoque: “forgetting self”
- Huallaga Huánuco Quechua: “declare, I do not live for myself” (source: Nida 1952, p. 154)
- Galela: “put self down” (source: Howard Shelden in Kroneman 2004, p. 501)
- Mairasi: “shuffle out of one’s vision (=forget) everything which is one’s own” (source: Enggavoter 2004)
- Q’anjob’al: “do not belong to oneself any longer” (source: Newberry and Kittie Cox in The Bible Translator 1950, p. 91ff. )
- Achi: “don’t do only what one wants to do”
- Chipaya: “leave one’s own way of living” (source for this and above: B. Moore / G. Turner in Notes on Translation 1967, p. 1ff.)
love (by God)
Translator Lee Bramlett submitted this on the translation of the Greek word that is translated into English as “love” (referring to God’s love). This letter was then reposted by Wycliffe Bible Translators (see here ):
“Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people? What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know who He was and how He wanted to relate to them?
“Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for ‘love.’ Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?
“Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, ‘Could you ‘ɗvi’ your wife?’ ‘Yes,’ they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.
“‘Could you ‘ɗva’ your wife?’ ‘Yes,’ they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.
“‘Could you ‘ɗvu’ your wife?’ Everyone laughed. ‘Of course not! If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘ɗvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.’
“Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, ‘Could God ‘ɗvu’ people?’
“There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. ‘Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.’
“One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from ‘I love you based on what you do and who you are,’ to ‘I love you, based on Who I am. I love you because of Me and NOT because of you.’
“God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there — unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.
“The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25: ‘Husbands, ‘ɗvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘ɗvu’-d the church…'”
In Hawai’i Creole English the love that God has is often translated as love an aloha. Aloha has a variety of meanings, including “hello,” “goodbye,” “love,” “thank you,” etc.
The Philippine languages of Cebuano, Tagalog, and Pampanga use a word (gugma, pag-ibig, and lugud respectively) that is also used for a “noble, refined love of people for each other,” distinct from romantic love. (Source: G. Henry Waterman in The Bible Translator 1960, p. 24ff. )
In Mairasi, the term that is used for love by God, for God and for people is the same: “desire one’s face.” (source: Enggavoter 2004)
See also love (Jesus for young, rich man), God is love and this devotion on YouVersion .
formal pronoun: crowd and Pilate
Like many languages (but unlike Greek or Hebrew or English), Tuvan uses a formal vs. informal 2nd person pronoun (a familiar vs. a respectful “you”). Unlike other languages that have this feature, however, the translators of the Tuvan Bible have attempted to be very consistent in using the different forms of address in every case a 2nd person pronoun has to be used in the translation of the biblical text.
As Voinov shows in Pronominal Theology in Translating the Gospels (in: The Bible Translator 2002, p. 210ff.), the choice to use either of the pronouns many times involved theological judgment. While the formal pronoun can signal personal distance or a social/power distance between the speaker and addressee, the informal pronoun can indicate familiarity or social/power equality between speaker and addressee.
Here, the crowd and Pilate address each other with the formal, respectful pronoun.
cup
The Greek that is translated as “cup” in English is translated in Chol as vaso i yejtal bʌ wocol: “glass which is the picture of affliction.”
Wilbur Aulie (in The Bible Translator 1957, p. 109ff. ) explains: “Whatever the precise meaning of ‘cup’ may be in these verses may never be agreed upon, but in the Septuagint it is used metaphorically of adversity and divine punishment. In these verses we used a Spanish borrowing vaso ‘glass’ and added the explanatory phrase, ‘which is the picture of wocol‘. Wocol has a rather wide range of meaning, including affliction, trial, punishment, and retribution. The term vaso was preferred to copa, which is regularly used by Spanish-speaking Christians, since Chol Christians understand copa to be a small glass of intoxicating drink.”
See also drink the cup I drink / be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with.