The Bible Translator: Volume 69, Issue 3

This article draws on interviews with key personnel and archival material to offer insight into the translation of and publishing issues in the Good News Bible. The New Testament was published by the American Bible Society (ABS) in 1966 as Good News for Modern Man: The New Testament in Today’s English. The success of the translation led to a decision to undertake the Old Testament. The ABS translation committee and board reviewed the OT drafts extensively, a process which often put them in conflict with the translators. The article will discuss key decisions taken by ABS. Some, for example the cover and artwork of the New Testament, were successful. Others, for example the marketing plan for the Old Testament, proved to be less so. View Less

This article surveys the wider context in the 1970s–1980s that compelled Bible publishers to prepare revisions of their translations: the rapid shift in spoken English was making the masculine-heavy English of major Bible translations feel antiquated to readers. The Good News Bible New Testament was first published in 1966 and its Old Testament in 1976, but already by the mid-1980s revision was being contemplated by the American Bible Society. The revision process was thoroughgoing and collaborative, with all English-using Bible Societies participating. More than 6,000 revisions were proposed and reviewed, with about 2,500 meeting consensus. Most were related to gender-exclusion, but a few were exegetical. Although the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project recommendations on almost 6,000 textual cruxes were published in preliminary form by 1979, the Good News Bible revision process could not incorporate those data. An addendum discusses the addition of the deuterocanonical books in 1979. View Less

This article will explore the Good News Bible (GNB) as an example of a translation designed to “localize” the source text—in this case, by virtue of its strategy to produce a translation in contemporary language. In this approach, designed to enhance the reader’s chance of making meaning, there are gains and losses. On one level, greater accessibility to the text for a wider audience may seem to be achieved, while at another level, access to the otherness/alterity in the source text (intertextuality, wordplay, etc.) is closed off. Several examples will illustrate some of these gains and losses in GNB. View Less

In some cases the meaning-based approach used in the translation of the Good News Bible appears to support translational choices that strengthen or even introduce anti-Judaism in translation. There are instances where such translational choices are not required by the source text. It is possible, in the examples selected for discussion, to arrive at translations that follow the source text closely, are less anti-Jewish, and conform to the principles of a meaning-based approach. In principle, almost every translator of texts from the New Testament faces translational choices possibly introducing a note of anti-Judaism in translation. However, the meaning-based approach might disambiguate ambiguous passages in a way that introduces a stronger note of anti-Judaism (if compared to more formally equivalent translations), as one of the examples indicates. View Less