The translation is a process by which a text (oral or written) in one language is transformed into an equivalent text in another.
In other words to transform a text from one style into a text in another style, but in the same language. The goal of a translation is usually to create a text in another language that is roughly the same style as the original. We create texts not only to convey or elicit certain information but also to accomplish certain goals and to affect our readers or listeners in certain ways.
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To really understand Bible translation, we have to know something about how the Bible came to us. When scholars do Bible translation, what are they translating from?
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None of the original manuscripts still exist. But thousands of copies of various portions of the Old and New Testaments do exist. Very early they were also translated into languages like Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopic.
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Can we know what God's prophets or apostles actually wrote?
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Over a thousand years after Moses and seven hundred years after Isaiah, Jesus quoted and cited many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures or the Septuagint and prefaced them not only with "Scripture says," but also "God says," "Moses says," or "Isaiah says." In fact, all the biblical manuscripts have been collated and studied for hundreds of years and melded into modern editions of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. For the Old Testament, we use the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia which is the modern heir of the original. for the New Testament, we use the 28th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece (2012), edited originally (1898) by Eberhard and Erwin Nestle, and more recently by Barbara and Kurt Aland and others to translate scripture.