Well, I continue to read The Voice and it continues to annoy me. But first let me note that in reading Ephesians 3 I don’t find anything that will lead you astray in your understanding of the chapter. In many cases the material in italics just seems unnecessary. In other words, the translators have already…
I haven’t had time to read enough of The Voice to draw final conclusions, just to make observations. I do intend to continue reading and try to come up with some more precise and well-supported conclusions. The problem is that I find The Voice the most difficult mix of good and bad ideas I’ve ever encountered…
Since I’ve been making moderately negative comments about The Voice here on this blog, I’m going to link to a more favorable short review at Englewood Review of Books. Here’s the conclusion: In some of the introductory material, the editors (led by Chris Seay) note that “Too often, the passion, grit, humor and beauty have…
I know I’m beating this topic to death, but I can’t help it. Really I can’t. Or at least I won’t. I was reading Hebrews today, and I ran into some interesting examples, both of positive and (in my opinion) negative uses of italics. Before I look at a couple of cases, however, I do…
I’ve been including The Voice Bible in my lectionary reading for the last couple of weeks. My early impression was that it was fairly good as a paraphrase, though the italics, while fairly consistent, were a bit distracting. I thought they were unnecessary. I was wrong. I have yet to do any sort of objective…
Yesterday I complained a bit about the explanation that The Voice provides to readers, informing them that since Bathsheba had just completed purification after her period, Uriah couldn’t be the father of the child. Today I was reading the same passage in the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and there we get the opposite. In…
Last week I mentioned that while I found the italics in The Voice more logical than I usually do in the formal equivalent translations that use the device (e.g. KJV, NKJV, NASB), I still found them annoying in the text. One goal of a dynamic equivalence translation is generally readability, and for me the italics…
I’ve always regarded the use of italics to indicate words that “aren’t in the Greek” one of the sillier notions in translating. Considering there are no English words in the Greek text, one could put everything in italics. On the other hand, if an English word isn’t in some way justified by the Greek (or…
