Many languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns (“we”). (Click or tap here to see more details)
The inclusive “we” specifically includes the addressee (“you and I and possibly others”), while the exclusive “we” specifically excludes the addressee (“he/she/they and I, but not you”). This grammatical distinction is called “clusivity.” While Semitic languages such as Hebrew or most Indo-European languages such as Greek or English do not make that distinction, translators of languages with that distinction have to make a choice every time they encounter “we” or a form thereof (in English: “we,” “our,” or “us”).
For this verse, the Jarai and the Adamawa Fulfulde translation both use the exclusive pronoun, excluding the Lord.
Following are a number of back-translations as well as a sample translation for translators of Jeremiah 3:22:
Kupsabiny: “Please return you (plur.) who went astray from me. I will make you trust in me. I want you to say, ‘We are returning because you are our God.” (Source: Kupsabiny Back Translation)
Hiligaynon: “People who are not faithful, [you (plur.)] return to me for I will-heal your (plur.) unfaithfulness.’ They replied, ‘Yes, we (excl.) will-come-near to you (sing.) for you (sing.) are the LORD our (excl.) God.” (Source: Hiligaynon Back Translation)
English: “Yahweh will say to them, ‘You Israeli people, come back to me! If you do that, I will cause you to never turn away from me again.’ The people will reply, ‘We are returning to you, because you are Yahweh, our God.” (Source: Translation for Translators)
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Like a number of other East Asian languages, Japanese uses a complex system of honorifics, i.e. a system where a number of different levels of politeness are expressed in language via words, word forms or grammatical constructs. These can range from addressing someone or referring to someone with contempt (very informal) to expressing the highest level of reference (as used in addressing or referring to God) or any number of levels in-between.
One way Japanese shows different degree of politeness is through the choice of a first person singular and plural pronoun (“I” and “we” and its various forms) as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. The most commonly used watashi/watakushi (私) is typically used when the speaker is humble and asking for help. In these verses, where God / Jesus is referring to himself, watashi is also used but instead of the kanji writing system (私) the syllabary hiragana (わたし) is used to distinguish God from others.
Click or tap here to see the rest of this insight.
Like a number of other East Asian languages, Japanese uses a complex system of honorifics, i.e. a system where a number of different levels of politeness are expressed in language via words, word forms or grammatical constructs. These can range from addressing someone or referring to someone with contempt (very informal) to expressing the highest level of reference (as used in addressing or referring to God) or any number of levels in-between.
One way Japanese shows different degree of politeness is through the choice of a formal plural suffix to the second person pronoun (“you” and its various forms) as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. In these verses, anata-gata (あなたがた) is used, combining the second person pronoun anata and the plural suffix -gata to create a formal plural pronoun (“you” [plural] in English).
Return … faithless … faithlessness all come from the same stem in Hebrew, indicating the continuing play on words; see verses 6 and 20. Here one way to keep the relation between the words is “Come back faithfully to me, you unfaithful people, and I will restore you to being faithful.”
It may be impossible in some languages to speak of healing faithlessness. Thus Good News Translation translates “he will heal you and make you faithful.” Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch expresses the same thought somewhat differently: “But the Lord says, ‘… I will put everything right between us once again!’ ”
Behold …: Here it is the people who are speaking. Revised Standard Version shows this simply with quotation marks, but Good News Translation makes the break clear by ending the poetry after the second line of the verse and beginning a prose paragraph with the third line. Revised English Bible continues the poetry, but has a break between the first and second half of the verse. Whatever translators do, they may find it helpful to have “The people say” or “You say” at the beginning of this line.
Behold, we come to thee; for thou art the LORD our God appears in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch as “Yes, Lord, we return to you, since you are our God.” Good News Translation, which uses a third person reference to God in verses 23-25, has “Yes, we are coming to the LORD because he is our God.” For Behold see 1.6.
Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .
Click or tap here to see the rest of this insight.
Like a number of other East Asian languages, Japanese uses a complex system of honorifics, i.e. a system where a number of different levels of politeness are expressed in language via words, word forms or grammatical constructs. These can range from addressing someone or referring to someone with contempt (very informal) to expressing the highest level of reference (as used in addressing or referring to God) or any number of levels in-between.
One way to do this is through the usage of lexical honorific forms, i.e., completely different words, as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. In these verses, mairu (参る), a humble form of kuru (来る) or “come” is used.
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