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It's interesting that you made reference to that proverb and if I had of gone back and quoted directly from Kohlenberger's introduction to the NIV Exhaustive Concordance instead of from memory then I would have also included it.
I remember reading the introduction to the original NIV Exhaustive Concordance back in 1990 where it was the first modern introduction that I had read where I found the insights into concordance making to be absolutely fascinating. As with probably most others, I started my Christian walk with a rather niave understanding of how the Scriptures were developed and it took me a few years to gain a better understanding of the complexities behind the transmission of the Biblical text down through the centuries.
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Introduction to the NIV Exhaustive Concordance (2015 edition):
"Bible Translating and Concordance Making
Traduttore traditore, “the translator is a traitor,” is an ancient proverb oft quoted in books about Bible translations. To a degree this proverb is true, for no translation can perfectly bring over all the meaning and nuances of one language into another. Because no two languages share identical grammar and an identical range of word meanings, not even the best-intentioned word-for-word translation can claim to perfectly represent the original.
If the translator is a traitor, the concordance maker must be a partner in crime. For no multilingual concordance can perfectly represent both the English translation and the biblical language texts it indexes. It can perfectly represent the vocabulary of the English text, for it needs only to list the location of each of its words. In this respect a concordance is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. But when a concordance attempts to display the relationship between the English text and the biblical languages, it falls heir to the same difficulties that face the Bible translator.
Much of Bible translation involves one-to-one relationships. More often than not, אלהים is translated
“God,” Ίησοΰς “Jesus,” and άγαπάω “love.” This part of translating and concordance making is easy.
Often, however, more than one word is needed in English to render a word in the originals. For example, the Greek word τεκνίον is regularly translated “little children” in the KJV and NAS and “dear children” in the NIV. Conversely, one English word can translate several words from the originals. Thus the infamous number “666” of Revelation 13:18 translates three Greek words.
Sometimes, because of differences in idiom, it takes several English words to translate two or more words from the original languages. This is called “dynamic equivalence” or “functional equivalence.” For example, the famous KJV expletive “God forbid!” translates one word in Hebrew and two words in Greek—neither of which has either “God” or “forbid” as part of its “literal” meaning! Nevertheless, “God forbid!” is the functional equivalent of the Greek and Hebrew phrases.
Multilingual concordances of the past have tended to display the relationship between English and the original languages as if it were almost always one-to-one. Scan a few columns of Strong’s Concordance, and you see context after context presenting one indexed word followed by one number. Over the years, this has lent support to the misconception that the KJV is an absolutely “literal,” word-for-word translation. However, the original preface to the KJV stated, “We have not tied our selves to an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. . . .” Young’s Analytical Concordance, and more so Eerdmans ’Analytical Concordance to the RSV that followed it, attempt to show multiple-word translation by means of multiple-word headings. However, nothing within the context itself shows how the indexed word relates to the original Greek or Hebrew.
The NIVEBC, by means of three different typefaces in the context line and a more nuanced use of its entirely new numbering system, shows more fully than any previous concordance the interrelation of the English text and the biblical languages."
Traduttore traditore, “the translator is a traitor,” is an ancient proverb oft quoted in books about Bible translations. To a degree this proverb is true, for no translation can perfectly bring over all the meaning and nuances of one language into another. Because no two languages share identical grammar and an identical range of word meanings, not even the best-intentioned word-for-word translation can claim to perfectly represent the original.
If the translator is a traitor, the concordance maker must be a partner in crime. For no multilingual concordance can perfectly represent both the English translation and the biblical language texts it indexes. It can perfectly represent the vocabulary of the English text, for it needs only to list the location of each of its words. In this respect a concordance is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. But when a concordance attempts to display the relationship between the English text and the biblical languages, it falls heir to the same difficulties that face the Bible translator.
Much of Bible translation involves one-to-one relationships. More often than not, אלהים is translated
“God,” Ίησοΰς “Jesus,” and άγαπάω “love.” This part of translating and concordance making is easy.
Often, however, more than one word is needed in English to render a word in the originals. For example, the Greek word τεκνίον is regularly translated “little children” in the KJV and NAS and “dear children” in the NIV. Conversely, one English word can translate several words from the originals. Thus the infamous number “666” of Revelation 13:18 translates three Greek words.
Sometimes, because of differences in idiom, it takes several English words to translate two or more words from the original languages. This is called “dynamic equivalence” or “functional equivalence.” For example, the famous KJV expletive “God forbid!” translates one word in Hebrew and two words in Greek—neither of which has either “God” or “forbid” as part of its “literal” meaning! Nevertheless, “God forbid!” is the functional equivalent of the Greek and Hebrew phrases.
Multilingual concordances of the past have tended to display the relationship between English and the original languages as if it were almost always one-to-one. Scan a few columns of Strong’s Concordance, and you see context after context presenting one indexed word followed by one number. Over the years, this has lent support to the misconception that the KJV is an absolutely “literal,” word-for-word translation. However, the original preface to the KJV stated, “We have not tied our selves to an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. . . .” Young’s Analytical Concordance, and more so Eerdmans ’Analytical Concordance to the RSV that followed it, attempt to show multiple-word translation by means of multiple-word headings. However, nothing within the context itself shows how the indexed word relates to the original Greek or Hebrew.
The NIVEBC, by means of three different typefaces in the context line and a more nuanced use of its entirely new numbering system, shows more fully than any previous concordance the interrelation of the English text and the biblical languages."
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