I know it has been awhile since I last posted on blog. There were other things I need concentrate on especially now that I’m doing Thursday Vesper and Sunday School Classes for College students.
Anyway, I recently raised a question to Pastor Bill Mounce in his website at www.billmounce.com about Bible translations into other languages aside from English. I learned a lot from his book, Basics of Biblical Greek, and I will forever be graceful to God for him for the knowledge I’ve acquired from him especially about Biblical languages. Anyway, here is part of the email question I sent him weeks ago:
Now both translations, as stated in their prefaces, claimed to have based their translation work from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts but as I work my way through the translation (have a working knowledge of Greek, English and Tagalog grammar), I began to notice that our Tagalog translation of theBible may have based it’s work not on the Hebrew and Greek themselves but on actually on the English Bibles (KJV and NIV).
Moreover, English grammar is VERY VERY different from the Tagalog language. Just for verbs alone, we don’t have tenses but only aspects (just like the greek). We also don’t follow strict word order because we have verb “focus”, a declension of the verbs that helps determine the main subject of the sentence, object and etc.
This is the reason why I noticed the similarity of the English Bible with our own Tagalog translation. It seems to follow the same grammatical rules of the English grammar while it should have been following the Greek or Hebrew.Does it really the case then? Do most translation of the Bibles in other languages really came straight from the Hebrew/Greek text or mediated from the English Bible?
Well, the exciting news here is that he answered back by posting my question into his blog site. In there, he gave his own personal insight about the issue and even appreciated our language’s verb focus. You can check out his full post in his website: www.billmounce.com
En Xristos,
Lance Filio
