A Life as a Translator

Let me explain at this point why my approach to translation grows more rigorous over time. For most of my working life, my job has been a translator of one type of another. During career in computers, I translated what people wanted the computer to do into computer code with the language to do it. I was a human to computer translator, as my software company grew, my role evolved more into market translation, translating the features of our programs into terms of potential addressing customer needs.

After selling my software company, my focus shifted to translating the ancient Chinese of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War into more useful English. During this process, I become absolutely faithful to the original text, refusing to add or delete anything. I didn’ this by first translating each character to its most likely meaning and then duplicating the Chinese line into an English sentence. Nothing could be ignored in the English, and nothing could be added, because I published the two versions side-by-side, with a glossary of other possible meaning for the characters in the back of the book. As I went through the text, I change some of those possible meanings because they didn’t fit Sun Tzu’s later use of the Chinese character. My goal was consistency. The result was what is still the only award-winning English translation, one used as a template for the work’s translation into other languages.

My disciple was later rewarded. As I learned more from the study of Chainese culture and began teaching Sun Tzu’s strategy, many of those obscure parts became clearer to me. I continue translated Sun Tzu’s work into the different languages of business: sales, marketing, management, and so on. Then I began translating it into other areas of competition, career building, romance, parents, sports, etc. I aways worked from the Chinese text, not my English translation. From this repeated review of the Chinese, I discovered the many hidden dimensions of the original test,

I then took what I learned to the translation of Jesus’s words. Over the almost twenty years I have been doing this, my translations have become more rigorous, not less. At first, I focused on the general meaning of his words at the time and how they were different than our Biblical translations I didn’t pay attention to the exact word forms, their cases, genders, numbers for nouns, their person, number, tense, voices, and moods for verbs, and words like “the” that are regular ignored or added in translation. In other words, I emulated Biblical translators who did all these things. Over time, I saw how much was lost by this carelessness, and began being more rigorous. I also realized that most of Jesus’s fun was in the word order, and because trying to preserve that when I could if it didn’t make him sound too much like Yoda.

I go through Jesus’s Greek again and again. My cyles through al of it take from thre to four years, but those times are getting quicker, even though I continued to add new ways to check my word. The result is my increasingly more precise translations at ChristsWords.com and the articles here explaining his words.