The Role of Translation

Every English Bible is already an interpretation. That is the first and most important thing to understand about the role of translation in biblical interpretation. When a translator renders a Greek or Hebrew text into English, they make thousands of interpretive decisions - about which English word best captures the original, how to handle ambiguity, whether to preserve the original's word order or restructure for English idiom, and how to render words that have no English equivalent. The reader of an English translation is reading not just the biblical author but also the translator's understanding of what the biblical author meant.

The Greek word dikaiosyne illustrates the problem. Most English translations render it as "righteousness," but the word covers a range of meaning that includes "justice," "right relationship," "fairness," and "what is due." When Paul says in Romans 1:17 that "the righteousness of God is revealed" in the gospel, English readers hear a word that sounds primarily like a moral quality - being righteous, behaving rightly. But the Greek carries a more relational and even legal dimension - the right standing of God in relation to the world, the justice of God that both judges and restores. Different translations handle this differently, and the difference matters theologically. The New Revised Standard Version sometimes translates dikaiosyne as "justice" in contexts where the social dimension is prominent, while more conservative translations consistently prefer "righteousness." Both choices are defensible; both involve interpretive judgment.

Awareness of translation's interpretive role has several practical implications. First, using multiple translations is not a luxury for the pedantic - it is a basic practice of honest reading that reveals where translators have made choices and where meaning is genuinely uncertain. Second, when a preacher or teacher makes a major point by emphasizing a specific word in the English text, it is worth asking whether the same emphasis is present in the original. Third, strong claims about what the Bible "clearly says" on contested questions should be tested against the translations - if translators working from the same original text reach different conclusions, the claim of clarity deserves scrutiny.

For readers who want to engage with the original languages without learning Greek and Hebrew, several tools are accessible. Bible Hub's interlinear feature shows each original word alongside its English translation and provides lexical information about the range of meaning. Strong's Concordance, available in print and online, provides a number for each Greek and Hebrew word in the Bible that allows even non-specialists to trace how a word is used across the biblical text. These tools do not make a non-linguist into a Greek or Hebrew scholar - but they do make available information that contextualizes the English translation and prevents the kind of over-confidence in any single rendering that produces interpretive error.