@slimboyfat: not nearly enough for actually understanding an old book like the Bible which the original text is often incomplete. I’ve done 1 year of Latin and 1 year of Russian, because the latter is a different alphabet, I know enough to know the alphabet, a basic level of grammatical and other structures and how to pronounce the words, a basic conversation (although if you don’t use it frequently, you forget it). But could I read War and Peace in the original language or Cicero, write a translation or thesis, know the meaning and the historical context, no, not even remotely. Most people here speak decent English, many people have taken English literature in college, but even Middle English you will have a hard time understanding and translating the works, especially incomplete ones without at least a PhD level (8 years of hard work) on the subject and even then, it takes a few years to be taken seriously in the field, to get to that level, we are talking 20-25 years of continuous education and immersion in not just the work but also the history, research, peer reviewed papers - there are people that spend their entire careers on a single book, you think WTBTS can just translate the entire Bible, independently, with a 2y starter course from a low grade University? It is obvious from any serious review of their translations that they borrow heavily from other translations and simply inject their own ideas outright.
The WTBTS and many religious types over time, even some people here attempting to do some independent scholarship all suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you want to be taken seriously, there are plenty of places to get independent review from scholars in the field, yet every single one of them is afraid to openly publish as they aren’t going to be taken seriously.
