Has the original meaning of the Bible been lost in translation ?

bible studies
Bible Studies Online asked:

It is not applicable only with the Bible. In fact holy epics in every religion have certain difficulties and these are parts of original text. It may be true that entire holy scriptures are perfectly inerrant but it can be adhered only with the original writings. Though, all of us claim to have the holy copies on our bookshelf but those are just duplicate copies and all those have ample chances of spelling errors, repetition, omission and many more.

King James Version of the Bible is one of the most popular versions of Bible but it is translated version and hence we find here some errors as well. Language is really the biggest one problem. The prime reason is differences between writing style of ancient Hebrews and modern man. For instance; ancient Hebrew have used only capital letters, did not use vowel and words are not separated from each other. So, the word structure is like jumbled puzzle and quite tough to unlock.

Translation of idiomatic expressions is quite tricky. Sometimes, exact translation might not be possible and its representation in speech pattern may convey bit differ messages.

Difficulties in the interpretation of Bible do not end here. Hebrews have used alphabets instead of numbers. So, sometimes words suggest numerical meaning and it becomes a riddle for us. Apart from all these difficulties, there is an interesting fact that most of the copyist’ errors do not affect original messages of the Bible.

The Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament uses hundreds of different figures of speech which are quite tough to identify. Somehow, if it could be possible to recognize then it does not be possible to covey full meaning in other language.

For instance: “Hitting the bull’s eye” is a very common term in English but the literally translation in other language leaves funny meaning.

A non English speaker translator may use “God’s sheep’s child” for the term “the lamb of God”. Uses of the word like “sister” for lover in songs of Solomon 4:9 is simply the mistake of translator because in Hebrew there are a many identical words which have different meaning and the word sister is just a sample.

Carl

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