First: careful, it is good to know that you are still around, and able to submit your valuable comments.
PetrW: I don't want to draw conclusions from two passages, but doesn't this
suggest a declining quality of translation and proofreading work...?
Not necessarily. We all know by now that the WT has shifted their translation practice towards greater simplification. Although I don´t have any WT literature before me giving out specifics on translation practices, I dare mention some observations.
For years, I noticed the WT publications contained the same number of pages in the many languages I looked up. Now, I find this interesting because some languages display more verbosity than English does, say, Portuguese, Spanish and French, to name a few. This means, that the WT translator teams faced the challenge of squeezing the extra phrasing necessary to convey the original English message into these other languages within the same space. In part, the publishing arm of the WT would handle this automatically. As a result, the font size was made smaller in some cases. But I suspect that the WT translators also had the instruction to keep the translated text as short as possible as well, an observation I noted in various WT publications. Interestingly, a WT translator at Bethel mentioned this once.
This process would affect the translation product to some extent. It does not mean the translation teams did not know any better in their assignments. They had to work with some suggested limitations from the start. The same could be said perhaps of other non-WT publications when translated into other languages. In fact, I have noticed the same thing in Bible versions, be it, English, or other. With some effort, anyone can see which Bible versions in English kept the translation product as brief as possible, while others did not. (One ex., John 11.35, Jesus wept vs Jesus burst into tears. - KJV vs Moffatt)
Besides the verbosity challenge facing translators, there is the issue of language rightness in different countries. In Spanish for example, a language spoken in many different countries, a good word in Spain may be a bad word in Mexico, and viceversa. The WT used dozens of proofreaders from different countries (somewhere between 80 and 90 if I recall correctly) in preparing this edition.
Then you have the doctrinal interpretation issues in some areas of the world. In some cases, the WT has explained how they have had to adapt the wording in some texts to clear various traditional misunderstandings in the various countries they are present. Is this why they have translation teams scattered around the world, that is, to improve the translation process and message communication? If so, consistency will take a back seat at times.
Acknowledging, translation can be done with a literal, contemporary, or paraphrase mission. The WT left the literal-meaning translation behind for the most part, with the exception of the English NWT (even in its updated form), which still bears quite a bit of literalness. Other NWT versions from the English obviously had less restrictions in the translation process. Translation is not always rigid, and it is the translatorś duty to determine when to stick to a literal reading, and when not to. Of course, there is always a risk of deviating from the original document when dismissing a literal reading. But even in the most literal versions, translators in some situations had no choice but to take a guess as to what the original writer meant when he wrote something.
In the case of Acts 2.46, the Greek structure, although not uncommon, is a bit complicated for readers of other cultures. Furthermore, to translate this text correctly, one must undertake various exegetical problems at hand. From the modern standpoint, is the bread referred to here the type of unleavened bread used in the commemoration of Jesus' death, or is it a term related to a common meal during the first century?
Should the translator render the Greek phrase katʼ oiʹkon
(from house to house) literally? Should this expression be understood in the sense that the believers in this context were doing the action at their homes (adverbial), or in the consecutive sense (physically, in walking distance, from house to house), or in the distributive sense, that is, from one house to another, distance apart, not physically together?
The NWT translators took the Greek phrase in the distributive sense: in different homes, that is, the believers met and shared meals together at different homes of fellow believers.
At Rev 5:14, it should be noted that some Greek texts do add: living to the ages of the ages, with no suffix, or pronoun. Jay P. Green has: (the) Living One living to the ages of the ages. The George Ricker Berry and the Newberry Interlinear read: and worshipped [him who] lives to the ages of the ages. (Brackets theirs)
Even in English, some translators (KJV, Young, Lamsa, Mace, Thomson, and others) add the vague him to end of the text which is missing in the Greek text.
It would be interesting to determine what the Czech, Slovak and Slovenian NWT translators had in mind by adding God
to the text. I wonder if any Czech, Slovak and Slovenian version or popular commentary there
include Jesus in the worship (Both God and the Lamb are mentioned in the
chapter). Anyways, these are some of the things that translators encounter in their business, and readers frequently lack these details to form an accurate conclusion.
If done correctly, an accurate translation need not be literal everywhere. A somewhat loose translation in some scriptures can communicate better with a lot of people. Regardless, all translators must submit to a realm of uncertainty in numerous places. We the readers gain from all the sound labor these translators accomplish.
