EnglishGeneral
Laughing in all the wrong places
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The Nuremberg trials involved great advances in interpreting methodology and technology. But this image shows a translation error provoking an appalling moment of levity in the midst of horror.
Surely one of the worst things a translator can do is to cause people to laugh when they should be crying!
- A colleague of mine once misread 'Leviathan's underparts' (Job 41:30 ESV) as 'Leviathan's underpants'.
- Another misread 'execrations' (Jer 42:18 ESV) as 'excrement' (and even translated it accordingly!)
- The Dead Sea Scroll 4QSama may bear evidence of 'guard the feet of his faithful' (1 Sam 2:9) having been misread as euphemistic.
What other cases of this have you encountered in Bible translation?


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