Essays on some style decisions

(Things like layout and punctuation)

Capitalisation

The OET uses capital letters at the start of sentences and to proper nouns (and we include 'God' in that) as per standard, modern English, but we don't add artificial capitalisation to pronouns and we try to limit the addition of capitalisation in terms like 'Kingdom of Heaven'. We say 'addition', because there's no capitalisation at all in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

As an example of where translators are divided over the interpretation of a word, look at the different capitalisation in the different versions displayed on our parallel verse page for 1 Chr 12:18. The original text says, 'And spirit clothed Amasai …'. But some translations add the definite article and capitalisation to get 'the Spirit' which is a valid interpretation, even though it's usually invisible to the reader that it's been done. Other translations (like NET) have 'a spirit' with a footnote to explain their decision to the reader (although we're prohibited from displaying those NET footnotes).

All to say that most English readers don't realise that those capitalised terms are interpretations made by translators. Since one of the aims of the OET is to make readers think more, we've decided not to add capitalisation any more than we need to.

(You should note, however, that we do mark the emphasis known as nomina sacra (or 'sacred names'—see below) that does come from the original Greek manuscripts.)

OET Literal Version

Nomina sacra (sacred names)

Some of the original New Testament Greek manuscripts contain a scribal device that's been given the Latin name nomina sacra (meaning 'sacred names').

More coming…

OET Readers' Version

Poetry

Just a quick introductory note first about 'poetic' English translations. I've heard people say how they like the King James Bible because it's so 'poetic'.

Take for example, Song/Psalm 119:105 which I grew up singing: "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." Of course, we can see that this is Hebrew poetry—not because it rhymes (like a lot of English poetry), but because it expresses the same thought twice in a row, but using different words. But to a modern English reader, it also sounds cute because of the archaic pronoun 'Thy' and the use of 'unto'. It sounds romantic because an oil lamp sounds more inviting than just turning on a torch/flashlight, and walking on a rough forest path sounds more inviting than walking on the nicely levelled footpath/sidewalk that we're more likely to do these days. These archaic and old-fashioned English words and cultural concepts are what makes that language seem poetic, even though the Hebrew author (and readers) considered it poetic for entirely different reasons (that many English readers don't even spot).

All to say that our notions of 'poetic' are often misconceived, and certainly the OET Readers' Version will be striving to use modern language as much as possible, as we value ease of understanding God's message (over archaic words and concepts which differ from our culture yet have nostaligic appeal for some more traditional readers who prefer an old-fashioned approach).

(Parentheses)

It's not uncommon to find extra explanations in the Bible text, and they're not always highly relevant or interesting to modern readers. Also, sometimes this material makes the text hard to read aloud because there's it's hard to discover the essential elements of the sentence to get the stress and emphasis correct. So the OET-RV doesn't hesitate to move this material into parentheses, thus clearly marking it as non-essential to the main flow of the text.

An example from Genesis 36:2: Esau had married two local women from the Canaan region: Adah (the Hittite Elon's daughter) and Oholibamah (Anah's daughter and granddaughter of the Hivite Zibeon).

Note that we also often add additional parenthetical material (especially the meaning of Hebrew names where it's relevant and helpful to the modern reader). However, like any other added material, these parenthetical statements are displayed in a lighter colour grey text so that's it's clear to the reader what the editors have added. (This is part of the OET commitment to total transparency in the translation process.)

Anachronisms

The OET Literal Version closely follows the original texts so no anachronisms should occur (beyond glosses for individual words), but it's very different for the Readers' Version where our aim is to make it easy for modern English readers to understand the message of the text. So we definitely use things like modern metric terms for weights and measures which are technically anachronisms since those units didn't exist in the time of the Bible writers.

However, we're quite prepared to go beyond that. Should we change 'sundial' to 'clock'? Well, we'd be prepared to make changes like that if we felt that it would help the understanding of the modern reader. (In that particular case, we would probably feel that the average, educated reader should probably know what a sundial is, even if they've never personally seen one. But obviously that conclusion might not be correct for all readers, so of course our renderings cannot possibly please everybody. The younger generations tend to learn more from videos and short articles rather than by reading a range of literature, so it's well known that their vocabulary sizes are declining on average. However, do note that making an 'easy-reader' or 'simplified' English Bible translation has been addressed by others, and isn't one of the primary goals of the OET.)

So what about 'casting lots' versus 'drawing straws' or 'throwing dice' (or maybe even 'flipping a coin'). Well, firstly we consider 'casting' to be archaic English outside of fishing or moulten metal contexts, so at best we'd want 'throwing lots (on the ground)' (as distinct from throwing like a cricket ball). But what is a 'lot' in that context? (It can also refer to your allocated piece of land.) Well, we don't actually know. Probably stones or sticks, but possibly even a special carved object somewhat like a dice, and of course the practise likely evolved throughout the millenia. (The Bible covers some 4,000 years of history.) In this case, the OET-RV probably won't hesitate to use a modern word like 'dice' even though that is clearly an anachronism. Why stumble the modern reader over something we don't even know anyway? (If you want the literal, just look across to our Literal Version.)

Word variety

The last thing that the general Bible-reading public needs are translations that attempt to always translate the same Hebrew or Greek word with the same word in the readers' language. (That might be okay for a Bible that people want to study using lexicons and other tools, but then studying the Bible is a different matter because that's not what the general Bible-reading public are doing.)

As an example, a Bible like that wouldn't have words in the Old Testament like 'temple' or 'palace' where the OT has 'בֵּית' (bēyt), as the most common translation of that word would be 'house'. Look at 2 Kings 16:8 in your favourite Bible translation to see how they did it. (That sentence contains both concepts of 'temple' and 'palace'.) A literal translation will likely have 'house of YHWH' and 'house of the king'.

Note: There is another less common Hebrew word 'הֵיכַל' (hēykal) which does translate literally as 'temple', e.g., see 1 Ki 6:3.

A literal Bible shouldn't have the word 'angel' in the Old Testament, because the normal translation of the word 'מַלְאָךְ' (malʼāk) would be 'messenger' like in Mal 2:7 (priests are Yahweh's messengers) . So a real literal version should also have a 'messenger' coming to Gideon in Jdg 6:11 (but most will have 'angel' there).

More coming…

Also, if it's possible and it doesn't lower the quality of either translation, we actually prefer that the Readers' Version and the Literal Version use different English glosses from each other, in order to complement each other, thus helping to indicate the potential range of meaning for that specific Hebrew or Greek word.

Some people might even have fun calling the OET Readers' Version an anti-literal translation, but we'd take that as a compliment. 😀

Saying—direct speech

Coming…

Surprise particle

Coming…

Rhythm or metre

Coming…

Phrase order

Sometimes the original Hebrew or Greek sentence has two or more items or phrases in an order that we wouldn't naturally use in modern English, so in the Readers' Version we won't hesitate to change the order to make it more natural for our readers.

There are two common reasons for these differences:

Every language/culture has common ways to say things, e.g., salt and pepper vs. pepper and salt, and the big, red house vs. the red, big house.
Most, if not all, of the Hebrew and Greek originals would have been dictated, so they had a speaker with a scribe writing on expensive parchment rather than a writer with a word-processor where it's very easy to do edits. Thus not everything will be in the most thought-out/logical order that might be expected of modern writing.

A simple, single-word example is silver and gold. In modern English, we would nearly always say gold and silver.

A longer example (talking about Yehudah/Judah) might have He sent the message into the towns and into Yerushalem/Jerusalem. This would be more natural in modern English as He sent the message into Yerushalem/Jerusalem and the surrounding towns.

Verse breaks

As we work our way through translating the scriptures, it's very obvious (and rather sad) that many translations make word and punctuation decisions around verse breaks. (While it's neither our aim or desire here to criticise other English translations, we do feel that it's important to point this out.) We find it very sad to see how so many Bible users take 'verses' (a totally 100% artificial construct superimposed on the scriptural text) out of context, and no Bible translation should encourage this problem.

We have found this problem to be especially noticeable in the collection of Songs/Psalms, but it's not uncommon throughout the scriptures.

So how's it obvious? Well, simply by looking at the number of sentences in most English Bibles that start a verse (and the sentence) with 'For'. (We've also written about that specifically here.) Simple logic says that we rarely start sentences in modern English with 'For' and so using 'Because' is more natural. But we were all also taught at school to try to avoid starting sentences with 'Because', because it's a linking word and much of the time it should be a continuation of the previous sentence. (If you want examples, just skim down the left of this very long page and note how many sentences/verses start with 'But' or 'For' and ask yourself the question, 'Would it have been more natural for that sentence to have been joined to the previous one?' or you can do the same thing in Psalms in your printed Bible.)

So it's important to always remember that when the Biblical authors wrote a document, or a song, or a letter, they weren't filling in a table of short sentences in boxes in a spreadsheet (that's more or less how 'verses' are represented inside computers), but they were trying to express the natural language in their minds onto parchment. There are some good reasons (often related to reading level) to try to keep translated sentences shortish, but how often have we lost the connections and the flow, and consequently encouraged snippets to be memorised and quoted out of context?

Note: the same can be said about chapter breaks, but although that's not an uncommon problem, it obviously doesn't affect the reader as numerously as the verse break issue does.