For several months I incorporated SENT into my daily reading and found the terminology to be very clear and natural-sounding. Thankfully, it avoids the use of slang, clichés, and colloquialisms that may not be widely understood. What's more, the translation appears to maintain accuracy in the original Greek context, while at the same time makes biblical concepts and ancient practices easier to grasp.
I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Mealy and ask him a few questions about his work on the SENT project. I wanted to give readers a chance to get to know the SENT translation and its creator. If you're having trouble relating to God and you'd like to add a new dimension to your Bible reading, I encourage you to consider the Spoken English New Testament.
Mr. Mealy, please tell me briefly about yourself and what inspired you to embark on the SENT project?
I suppose in some ways the inspiration for SENT goes all the way back to my college days. I took all the New Testament Greek courses I could, and when I ran out of those I designed and took an independent study course in which I translated the Gospel of John from the original Greek. My first motivation as a New Testament scholar, has always been to make the Scriptures accessible for people who have either never read them or have never understood them. I am also passionate about making the Scriptures clear, fresh, and meaningful for people who have grown up hearing and reading them in forms of English that are so separate from everyday language that they unconsciously assume what they are reading belongs to another realm—a special and separate realm of religious things, or a realm of "long ago and far away."
It's important for believers to read and study a reliable and accurate translation that stays as faithful as possible to the original text. Can you reassure readers by explaining how you maintained accuracy in your translation of SENT?
That's a very big subject, but let me explain some of the basics. The authors of the original New Testament spoke and wrote Greek, the most widely spoken and understood language of the first century Mediterranean region. My translation attempts to stay closely faithful to what each author said in Greek by consistently following a number of steps.
First, I have to form an accurate understanding of what the person is saying. To do that, I look up words I don't know well in one or more dictionaries of ancient Greek, and use grammatical tools if I am not totally confident of the relationships between the words. I'm not free to assume the person means something by a word unless the dictionary says the word means that, and I will do a careful word study of both the Old and New Testaments (and early church writings as well) if I occasionally feel that I must differ from the most widely accepted interpretation of a theological word. I do this because I can't just put down what I'd like to think the person meant. When I work conscientiously with standard dictionaries, and I take careful note of actual usages in similar texts, I maximize my chances of understanding without bias what the words mean.
Grammar is similar. Standard grammars describe the meanings that are known to be conveyed by aspects of language such as combinations of words, word forms, and sentence word orders. No one is simply free to make up their own grammar, otherwise no one would understand them. And by the same token, I'm not free to make up a supposed relationship between the words of a sentence in the New Testament that doesn't conform to the known principles of ancient Greek grammar. In summary, I use my experience reading the language and standard, recognized tools to form as clear and accurate an understanding as possible of what the person is trying to say.
What about the actual translation part? Isn't what you've described just half the battle?
Absolutely right. Once I've achieved as thorough an understanding as possible, I am presented with a second challenge. How do I convey what I understand the person to be saying in clear, accessible contemporary English, and how do I render it as accurately and faithfully as possible?
There is no one-size-fits-all working method for achieving this. And it's much harder than you might expect.
Actually, I learned to speak Portuguese while living in Brazil, and after a couple of years, I was able to translate and interpret live sermons. As a result, I have some comprehension of how tough spoken language translations can be. Can you tell readers what's difficult about it?
As you probably discovered, a translator can't just consistently use the same English word to render each Greek word, nor can they put the words together using the English grammatical relationships that correspond to the Greek grammatical relationships in each sentence. The truth is that no two languages map onto one another feature for feature—either word for word or grammatical rule for grammatical rule. And attempting to translate as though that were the case results in a grotesque and unreadable text.
For example, consider this word-for-word rendering of Matthew 1:18a:
Of the but Jesus Christ the birth thus was.
Or consider the Concordant Literal New Testament rendering of Romans 8:12-13:
Consequently, then, brethren, debtors are we, not to the flesh, to be living in accord with flesh, for if you are living in accord with flesh, you are about to be dying.
The fact is that Greek not only uses a different word order from English, but it also casts ideas into words differently in many ways. As a result, if I attempt to imitate an author's Greek manner of expression closely, I will not be able to produce understandable, let alone natural, English.
