Bible Translations  

Can I ask what your qualifications are to do this? I'm just interested in knowing.

I am a Christian, a child of God. God gives spiritual gifts to each of His children. After baptism into Christ, I was given the gift of knowledge and understanding Bible Greek.

I hope you compare my translations with the versions we have now. By the way, the German Bible Society gave me the permission to translate THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT, Second Edition and Fourth Revised Edition.

I hope that you look at the works and not my person. I hope that we study the Word of God objectively.

I will check out the site. Thanks for sharing.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of that time.

When I started translating, I didn't know anything about translation approach. I just wanted the Word of God translated from Greek to English - Greek word to its corresponding English equvalent.

Now that I come across some translation approach, I found out that paraphrase is very misleading and dangerous to use as it may lead to wrong understanding of the Word.

The PLAIN translation which I adopted is very beautiful and true as we see how God express Himself. I followed both the Greek and English grammar and I just supplied English words for grammar purposes which are all written in italics to identify them (readers may remove them if they so desire).

I hope that you compare my translations with the versions circulating around the world.

The Concordant Literal NT is an excellent example of a word-for-word translation. I find it really very useful.

One issue though with a word for word translation is that those older languages that those original texts were written in were composed of far fewer words. The words context changes based on other words they are associated with.

I may be wrong on this though as I am not a scholar of these ancient languages.

Unfortunately that is impossible to do anything about. Word-for-Word translations do try but all languages have concepts that don't translate literally, an example is the French saying " O La la!", try translating that literally and all you get is gibberish.

The most a translator can do is to try and find the nearest equivalent and hope that it is not too wrong.

I have especially published GREEK-ENGLISH (Grammar & Vocabulary), and WORDS in THE WILL New Testament, to support my translations. The latter consists of practically all the words in the New Testament in English indicating the Greek word, part of speech, number of times used, and the verses where found. Words used are consistent as much as possible throughout the whole New Testament - that means the same English word used for one Greek word and not like a very popular version using 27 English words for one Greek word.

Word for word translation or literal translation is practically impossible as the sentence order in Greek is not like in English which is just subject and predicate or the inverted order. In Greek, sometimes the accusative is written ahead of the nominative. If in English, the arrangement should be nominative, genitive and/or dative, then accusative. But even if the Greek words be rambled, they could be arranged following the English grammar because wherever the nominative is, we know that it is the subject, and so on with genitive, dative, and accusative. If we understand Greek grammar, we won't be lost in translating.

It's good there area already bases for your translations that anybody may check anytime they please. It's very difficult to translate and I hope God will bless you and guide you and that you finish such translation work.

THE WILL New Testament (Greek to English) is a translation of THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT, Second Edition and Fourth Revised Edition, the copyright of which is owned by the German Bible Society which gave me the permission to translate. They are consistently undertaking researches and if there be any mistake in it, my translation follows. But this is more accepted than the other one (there are only two of them).

GENESIS & EXODUS (Greek to English) is translated from the Septuagint also known as LXX or Greek Old Testament. Allegedly, there's no copyright owner and anybody may translate it and so do I.

Apparently, Bible Societies and other religious organizations have their own research and publish their versions now circulating around the world.

I hope that we could get the real God's message from the translations.

The idea of translations in the same book is quite interesting, espcially since one of those versions is a paraphrase instead of a more literal translation.

So very true. The problem with a living language is that it keeps growing and changing.

I don't know that people who say the Bible contradicts itself are so hung up on different meanings of words like replenish though.

Languages keep on changing but Bible Greek is dead, it could no longer be changed. It seems that God did this so that His Word won't change.

If your reasoning for the NIV and KJV differences are true, why does the NIV skip the verse number? Well, as I type this the answer comes to mind... Being that I guess it could be so that comparing verses translation to translation would be easier.

As for the Bible version that speaks to your condition and builds your relationship to God and other people being the best, I agree only up to a certain extent. Some people scavenge through numerous translations to find exact words that best suit what they are doing. If you favor a translation only for a certain verse and then another for another and yet more translations again for only certain exact wordings, is that not in some way marginalizing the value of the translation?

I say this because I know of a christian author who quotes the bible heavily in their writings, but pulls from at least 7 different translations in the book I just finished reading. The author uses these quotes to highlight his message (his as in the author's, not His as in God) to the point he puts certain words from the verse in italics to further point them out as to say that because those words match the author's words they somehow better justify the author's words. Seemed a little strange to me.

I just want to say that among the many versions that I have seen, NIV is the worst.

I would generally disagree,

The NIV does have some areas of weakness but then it is a thought-for-thought translation and thus less accurate than say the NASB.

Doesn't make it a bad translation though. Some of the best and brightest of Biblical translators worked on that version, men and women who were called of God. I am not suggesting that these folk are beyond criticism but I AM suggesting that the criticism be contructive.

You say it is the worst translation, in your opinion, why? What is it that makes it so bad? Do you have examples, can we look at the Greek and see how the translation is wrong in your mind?

Kiwimac

"thought-for-thought" translation for the NIV... this might be the reason why it did not come out good enough that I said among all the more than 10 versions that I saw, NIV is the worst.

It is very difficult to point out the so many not good interpretation made in the NIV but I think if a person has some knowledge of the Bible Greek and compare it with the NIV, I think many will agree with me that NIV is the worst among many versions of the Holy Bible. It is not because of the pool of many scholars who worked on it that it is already good.

Open up your NIV to Mark 7:16 or Mark 11:26.

From the KJV
Mark 7:16
"If any man have ears to hear, let him hear."

Mark 11:26
"But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses."