Doctor Claims He Has Evidence of the Afterlife

MSNBC ^ | 1/20/10 | Michael Inbar

[Hootowl]

And how can you NOT understand that the English translators inserted the comma where they thought it should be? They also inserted quotation marks, colons, semi-colons, and so forth. Will you assert that those ARE found in koine Greek, or do you just have a problem with commas?

[woollyone]

so, the commas were inserted by interpreters who used their own opinion. good now we’re getting somewhere. So you said they were “mjssplaced”. Then comes the rub. According to whom? You? It is a matter of interpretation, not translation at all then. And THAT was my point.

[Hootowl]

What else have I been saying?

If you want to argue that a “perfect” translation of koine Greek would not include punctuation (or, for that matter, spaces between words or capitalization), you would technically be correct, although the result would be gibberish.

Translators also “interpret” (i.e., Merrian Webster: to explain in understandable terms) what they are translating so that it makes sense to second-language readers. That’s what makes something like Brian Hooker’s translation of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” so eloquent in English. If Hooker had merely translated the French, word for word, the play would have been stilted and plodding in English. But Hooker used his poet’s ear and mastery of English to breath color and life into the translation, to interpret it, in other words.

And so my point was that the punctuation in the text was a decision by the translators/interpreters, based on what they thought was closest to the meaning of the passage. The comma could easily have been placed somewhere else and the sentence would still have made sense, even though the meaning would have changed.

[Reagan Man]

Interesting subject. Not to disparage those of us who believe in an afterlife, but humans have many things in common, including powerful imaginations.