The English Standard Version makes its debut in Germany

That’s right. A bilingual English-German edition of the Bible (without Apocrypha) is about to be published by Germany’s premier publisher of Bibles, the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. It is announced here. The ESV will appear alongside of the 1984 revision of Luther’s classic translation. The choice is understandable. The ESV, not the NRSV, is the English equivalent of the 1984 revision of the Lutherbibel.

It will be interesting to see how well the bilingual edition sells.

At the moment, DB’s best-selling “foreign-language” Bible is a German-Russian New Testament. This is not surprising. 2.5 million Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler who lived in the former Soviet Union have resettled in Germany. Deutschrussisch, a pidgin language I remember hearing near Stuttgart in the early 1990s, has of course no future to speak of. As a pastor in Wisconsin, though they are almost all now deceased, it has been a pleasure to serve as pastor to Volga Germans with stories to tell of the old country.

DB’s second best-selling “foreign-language” Bible is its trilingual German-French-English New Testament: Lutherbibel (1984 revision); Louis Segond (1978 revision); and KJV (1611). Personally, I would love to see a series of quadrilingual Bibles published, for example:

Zürcherbibel (2007); La Nouvelle Bible Segond (2002); La Nuova Riveduta (1994); the English Standard Version (2001)

The Greek Septuagint, alongside of the new German, French, and English translations thereof

Comments

[John]

Is it wrong that I was hoping for some kind of challenge to the statement about the inclusion of the ESV vs. the NRSV?

Not that I disagree, but that I don't know the realities between the differences, and while I neither know much about the NRSV, nor support neutering translations, I do often like to read the argumentation in regards to those things outside my purview(s).

[JohnFH]

Hi John,

Nice blog you have there. I see you have been grappling with NRSV vs. ESV here:

http://aguyblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Gender%20Neutered

The NRSV has a lot going for it, but departs from the Tyndale-Geneva-KJV tradition far more than ESV does, with the result that NRSV is less of a counterpart to the 1984 revision of the Lutherbibel than ESV is.

Furthermore, NRSV departs more radically from the wording and diction of the source text than does ESV. NRSV is more understandable as a result, but once again, this makes it *unlike* Lutherbibel 1984 and Segond 1987, which, like ESV, make fewer concessions to standard vernacular usage.

The whole question of gender-neutral and gender-neutered translation of the Bible is very controversial. Wherever a case can be made that the sense of the original was inclusive in scope, NRSV revised the language of the original such that masculine pronouns were eliminated.

For some people, a translation that isn't "gender-neutered" is beyond the pale. Among others, the move has not found acceptance and has even brought on a backlash. The official Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic position, shared by many evangelical Protestants, is that NRSV is not traditional enough for the liturgy.

[Phil Sumpter]

The Volga Germans (Russlandsdeutsche as they are called here) certainly have a story to tell. I count it a privilege being married to a second generation one. They have a kind of sub-culture here in Germany and it's kinda cool being on the "inside."

[JohnFH]

Phil,

That is so cool. I would encourage you, if you find people in your extended family with memories they are able to recount in uncorrupted antique German, to record it for posterity. The recordings will be of interest to linguists and ethnographers alike.

[Phil Sumpter]

I seriously would like to write a biography of her parents, especially her dad. Of course, it is a question of time. The grandmother of a friend of hers has written an autobiography which Ingrid's mother said was basically the same as her story.

They wouldn't be able to do that in antique German though ... Her father stopped speaking German when I was orphaned at 9. Her mother learnt a kind of Swabian as those were the ones she got on best with when Stalin herded them together into camps.

[John]

Hmmm...antique German? I know a guy who's family has a Bible in "German", the doubt there being his tone, not mine. He can speak some high German, but emigrating from Germany, apparently his family traditionally spoke a form so "low" that it's barely intelligible; he picked-up more of the higher register language, apparently piecemeal (i.e. due to being born and raised here in America). I wonder how many Bibles out there are historical anomalies, how often it was that whether in secret or otherwise, the Bible was rendered into the idiom of some group or another, since so often the case was that languages were myriad unlike contemporary dominance by just one or two of an entire region. And I wonder how many of these are would-be treasures for those tongue-lovers but unknown since so much of history is hidden by the fragmentation of history, of a fractured world now bygone: not speaking, here, of all the sects and schools of ideology as today and as has always been, but rather of the phenomena then and now how even divided, a common tongue unites, but common tongues, though usually there is one or another koine, are not the historical reality, but secondary to the hearts of the people: like the modern French surging to re-adopt their regional varieties as the dominant form is de-emphasized in the name of reducing discrimination.

[John]

[QUOTE]
Hi John,

Nice blog you have there.[/END QUOTE]

Thanks by the way. : ) And a question, if you will. In Hebrew poetry, how important is word order? And how does it bear on translation? As in Psalm 1, "and in his law he meditates day and night", could it be argued (I don't know enough of the hebrew so this is purely hypothetical) that at this point, if the Hebrew text is "day and night", that in English it should be "day and night", or that perhaps it's a reverse in Hebrew of what would be expected, such that we should render "night and day"? (I don't know if this bears upon any of it, but the Hebrew Bible does have an obsession of sorts with "evening and morning", "dark then light", etc., i.e. the reverse of our thoughts (day then night, light then dark...).

Interested in any thoughts! : )

[John]

Now that you've pointed me back to my old post, I decided to do some more revising, critiques welcome. I was "blessed" with nurturing example of reactionaries (a new favored word in that revised post) for a while, and decided to check for any untoward or uncareful statements of my own, and remove what might be construed as implications not intended by the mouths quotes, ideas referenced, that the post could be construed to indicate.

By the way, for "blessed" above, see the massorah for the word in Job at the impudent statement of Job's wife.

[JohnFH]

Hi John,

I was "away from my desk" for a day. Sorry I didn't answer earlier.

The history of Bible translation is fascinating. There is no doubt that word order is important in Hebrew, as it is in any language, for reasons of information structure and pragmatics (these are linguistic concepts you might want to investigate). It is not always possible to map Hebrew word order into English, German, or whatever order with the same resultant effect. Translation done right is easier said than done.

The idiom in Hebrew is "day and night," not "night and day." People in Bible times conceptualized time in more than one way for different purposes. Just as we do.