הֲיִוָּדַ֣ע בַּחֹ֣שֶׁךְ פִּלְאֶ֑ךָ וְ֝צִדְקָתְךָ֗ בְּאֶ֣רֶץ נְשִׁיָּֽה׃
12Are your wonders known in the darkness
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?
The Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that is translated as “forget” in English is translated in Noongar as dwangka-anbangbat, lit. “ear-lose.” (Source: Portions of the Holy Bible in the Nyunga language of Australia, 2018).
See also remember and forget (Japanese honorifics).
Following are a number of back-translations as well as a sample translation for translators of Psalm 88:12:
Following is a list of (back-) translations of various languages:
Those who approach the New Testament solely through English translations face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice. In most English translations, the word “justice” occurs relatively infrequently. It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice; the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch — and for all I know, most languages.
The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as “justice” is dikaiosunē (δικαιοσύνη); the adjective standardly translated as “just” is dikaios (δίκαιος). This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants.
To the person who comes to English translations of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word “just,” the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word “right.” The noun, for example, is usually translated as “righteousness,” not as “justice.” In English we have the word “just” and its grammatical variants coming horn the Latin iustitia, and the word “right” and its grammatical variants coining from the Old English recht. Almost all our translators have decided to translate the great bulk of dik-stem words in the New Testament with grammatical variants on the latter — just the opposite of the decision made by most translators of classical Greek.
I will give just two examples of the point. The fourth of the beatitudes of Jesus, as recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The word translated as “righteousness” is dikaiosunē. And the eighth beatitude, in the same translation, reads “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Greek word translated as “righteousness” is dikaiosunē. Apparently, the translators were not struck by the oddity of someone being persecuted because he is righteous. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted; people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble.
It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of “righteousness” are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of “justice.” “Righteousness” names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. (…) The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. “Justice,” by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way. There is, indeed, a long tradition of philosophical and theological discussion on the virtue of justice. But that use of the term has almost dropped out of idiomatic English; we do not often speak any more of a person as just. And in any case, the concept of the virtue of justice presupposes the concept of those social relationships that are just.
So when the New Testament writers speak of dikaiosunē, are they speaking of righteousness or of justice? Is Jesus blessing those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or those who hunger and thirst for justice?
A thought that comes to mind is that the word changed meaning between Plato and the New Testament. Had Jesus’ words been uttered in Plato’s time and place, they would have been understood as blessing those who hunger and thirst for the social condition of justice. In Jesus’ time and place, they would have been understood as blessing (hose who hunger and thirst for righteousness — that is, for personal moral rectitude.
Between the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament there came the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. (…) One of the challenges facing the Septuagint translators was how to catch, in the Greek of their day, the combination of mishpat (מִשְׁפָּט) with tsedeq (צֶ֫דֶק). Tsedeq that we find so often in the Old Testament, standardly translated into English as justice and righteousness. The solution they settled on was to translate tsedeq as dikaiosunē, and to use a term whose home use was in legal situations, namely, krisis (κρίσις), to translate mishpat. Mishpat and tsedeq became krisis and dikaiosunē. For the most part, this is also how they translated the Hebrew words even when they were not explicitly paired with each other: mishpat (justice) becomes krisis, tsedeq (righteousness) becomes dikaiosunē. The pattern is not entirely consistent, however; every now and then, when mishpat is not paired off with tsedeq, it is translated with dikaiosunē or some other dik-stem word (e.g., 1 Kings 3:28, Proverbs 17:23, Isaiah 61:8).
I think the conclusion that those of us who are not specialists in Hellenistic Greek should draw from this somewhat bewildering array of data is that, in the linguistic circles of the New Testament writers, dikaiosunē did not refer definitively either to the character trait of righteousness (shorn of its negative connotations) or to the social condition of justice, but was ambiguous as between those two. If dikaiosunē had referred decisively in Hellenistic Greek to righteousness rather than to justice, why would the Septuagint translators sometimes use it to translate mishpat, why would Catholic translators [into the 1980s] usually translate it as “justice,” and why would all English translators sometimes translate it as “justice”? (All earlier Latin-based Catholic translations, the New American Bible and the Jerusalem Bible, both of which appeared in the early 1970s have most occurrences of dik-stem words translated with variants on “just.” In subsequent revisions of the New American Bible, and in the New Jerusalem Bible, these translations have been altered to translations along the lines of righteousness. Other translations that use a form of justice or “doing right / rightness” include the British New English Bible [1970] and Revised English Bible [1989] and some newer translations such as by Hart [2017], Ruden [2021] or McKnight [2023]).
Conversely, if it referred decisively to justice, why would the Septuagint translators usually not use it to translate mishpat, and why would almost all translators sometimes translate it as “righteousness”? Context will have to determine whether, in a given case, it is best translated as “justice” or as “righteousness” — or as something else instead; and if context does not determine, then it would be best, if possible, to preserve the ambiguity and use some such ambiguous expression as “what is right” or “the right thing.”
Let me make one final observation about translation. When one takes in hand a list of all the occurrences of dik-stem words in the Greek New Testament, and then opens up almost any English translation of the New Testament and reads in one sitting all the translations of these words, a certain pattern emerges: unless the notion of legal judgment is so prominent in the context as virtually to force a translation in terms of justice, the translators will prefer to speak of righteousness.
See also respectable, righteous, righteous (person), devout, and She is more in the right(eous) than I.
Translators of different languages have found different ways with what kind of formality God is addressed.
Like many languages (but unlike Greek or Hebrew or modern 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.
In these verses, in which humans address God, the informal, familiar pronoun is used that communicates closeness.
Voinov notes that “in the Tuvan Bible, God is only addressed with the informal pronoun. No exceptions. An interesting thing about this is that I’ve heard new Tuvan believers praying with the formal form to God until they are corrected by other Christians who tell them that God is close to us so we should address him with the informal pronoun. As a result, the informal pronoun is the only one that is used in praying to God among the Tuvan church.”
In Gbaya, “a superior, whether father, uncle, or older brother, mother, aunt, or older sister, president, governor, or chief, is never addressed in the singular unless the speaker intends a deliberate insult. When addressing the superior face to face, the second person plural pronoun ɛ́nɛ́ or ‘you (pl.)’ is used, similar to the French usage of vous.
Accordingly, the translators of the current version of the Gbaya Bible chose to use the plural ɛ́nɛ́ to address God. There are a few exceptions. In Psalms 86:8, 97:9, and 138:1, God is addressed alongside other “gods,” and here the third person pronoun o is used to avoid confusion about who is being addressed. In several New Testament passages (Matthew 21:23, 26:68, 27:40, Mark 11:28, Luke 20:2, 23:37, as well as in Jesus’ interaction with Pilate and Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well) the less courteous form for Jesus is used to indicate ignorance of his position or mocking.” (Source Philip Noss)
In the most recent Manchu translation of 1835 (a revision of an earlier edition from 1822), God is never addressed with a pronoun but with “father” (ama /ᠠᠮᠠ) instead. Chengcheng Liu (in this post on the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology blog ) explains: “In Manchu tradition, as in Chinese etiquette, second-person pronouns could be considered disrespectful when speaking to superiors or spiritual beings. Manchu Shamanist prayers avoided si [‘you’] and sini [‘your’] for this very reason. To use them for God would be, in Lipovzoff’s [one of the two translators] words, ‘the most uncouth and indecent way to speak to the Almighty — as if He were a servant or slave.’ There was also a grammatical problem. In Manchu, si and sini could refer to both singular and plural subjects. For a faith that insisted on the singularity of God, this was potentially confusing. By contrast, repeating ama removed any ambiguity.”
In Dutch, Afrikaans, and Western Frisian translations, God is always addressed with the formal pronoun.
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 (or a lack) of an honorific prefix as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. When the referent is God, the “divine” honorific prefix mi- (御 or み) can be used, as in mi-ude (みわざ) or “work (of God)” in the referenced verses.
(Source: S. E. Doi, see also S. E. Doi in Journal of Translation, 18/2022, p. 37ff. )
In these three verses, by means of rhetorical questions the psalmist gives expression to the belief that the dead in Sheol are completely cut off from Yahweh’s care and concern. Yahweh performs no wonders there (verses 10a, 12a), as he had when he freed his people from Egypt. His steadfast love (chesed; see comments, 5.7), his faithfulness (ʾemunah; see 36.5), his saving help (tsedaqah; see 5.8) are all absent from Sheol, which is called the grave (see verse 5b), Abaddon, which means “destruction” (the Hebrew name comes from the verb “to perish”; see comments on “broken” in 31.12), the darkness (see verse 6), the land of forgetfulness (verse 12b), that is, the land where the inhabitants are forgotten by God (see verse 5c). It is less likely, as Biblia Dios Habla Hoy has it, that the land of forgetfulness means “the land where everything is forgotten.” All these names and phrases accurately portray the concept of Sheol, the world of the dead, which was prevalent at that time. Good News Translation has imitated the Hebrew in using rhetorical questions in verses 10-12 as an effective way of expressing the despairing, hopeless attitude of the psalmist. In some cases strong negative statements may be more effective; for example:
• You make no miracles for the dead,
and they do not rise up and praise you.
Your constant love is never mentioned in the grave,
and no one speaks of your faithfulness in the place of destruction.
No one sees your miracles in that place of darkness,
nor your goodness in the land of the forgotten.
Abaddon or Good News Translation‘s “place of destruction” is synonymous with the grave, and the translator should avoid giving the impression that they refer to different places. Wonders known must often be recast as active; for example, “Do the dead in the grave see the great works that you do?” Land of forgetfulness may sometimes be rendered as “that place of the dead where God is no longer concerned with dead people” or “in the grave where God pays no attention to the dead.”
In verse 10a the psalmist speaks of the dead, but in verse 10b he uses the more dramatic shades. In verse 11a the ordinary term grave is paralleled in verse 11b by the more literary level Abaddon, and in verse 12a the common darkness is matched by the more imaginative land of forgetfulness. In this series of parallel lines the writer is moving the idea of death forward toward the point of total extinction. Translators should pay particular attention to see that the terms they use and the poetic devices they employ reflect this movement.
In verse 10b the dead are called the shades. The Hebrews did not speak of the “souls” or “spirits” of the dead surviving in Sheol, as did the Greeks; the “shades” or “shadows” were pale, lifeless, ineffectual, shadowy images or replicas of the former living, active, robust self. Care should be taken not to picture them as ghosts, however, since this introduces elements not present in the Hebrew concept.
In the translation of the rhetorical questions in verses 10-12, the translator must first decide if such a sequence of questions is natural in the receptor language. If the questions are natural, do they require responses, since they assume a negative reply? Are there implicit elements that need to be made explicit in the receptor language? If the keeping of the question form will result in an unnatural style, the translator may have to recast these questions as statements. Examples are given here of two ways to handle the questions of verse 10 and three ways to treat them in verse 11. The same applies equally well to verse 12 or to any other rhetorical question. Verse 10: “Do you make miracles for the dead? No! Do the dead praise you? Never!” or, as negative statements, “You do not perform miracles for the dead, and they do not get up and praise you.” In verse 11: “Is your constant love spoken of in the grave? No! Is your faithfulness spoken of in the place of the dead? Never!” As negative statements: “Your constant love is not spoken of in the grave, nor is your faithfulness spoken of in the place of the dead.” With further adjustments for implicit information: “Do the dead in their graves speak about how you always love them, or do they talk about how faithful you are to them in the world of the dead?” Each question in the last rendering may in turn be followed by a negative reply or may be transformed into a negative statement, each case depending on the requirements of the receptor language.
Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Reyburn, William D. A Handbook on the Book of Psalms. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1991. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .
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