I have written before about the odd experience of growing up with a father who didn’t speak English and a mother who didn’t speak French. This meant that I was often in a position of having to translate for my parents, badly or opportunistically, when things got heated. When my parents argued, I had a strange power. I could misinterpret diplomatically. 

My unique power diminished as they slowly learned each other’s language, but then another problem emerged. Each would conjugate verbs at will, or invent entirely new ones, usually bearing no resemblance to any known grammatical system. As such, I would travel through my different communities — English and French — and often reproduce these quirks. “No,” my cousin might correct me kindly, “in French, airplane is masculine.” Or, less kindly: “That isn’t even a word!” I would nod knowingly, as though I’d done it on purpose. “Indeed. I was just testing you….”

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I thought of this recently as I undertook a road trip between Vancouver and Calgary. Staring blithely out the car window I unconsciously read the placenames on the roadside signs. I was suddenly thrust back into my linguistically muddled childhood as I read, “Vallée de la beaver,” “Chute ruissault-bear” Why Beaver Valley and Bear Creek Falls kept the English words for the animals was beyond me. Another, which was quirky in a different way, was Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk, which was rendered as ‘sentier du chou-puant’ — smelly cabbage — instead of ‘Chou mouffet.’

I was reminded of similar stories when I travelled internationally. If I remember rightly, Portugal, in Italian, is Portogallo, but if spelled porto gallo means “carrying a rooster.” I also remember reading an interesting article about why place names aren’t always translated literally. Otherwise Darmstadt, Germany would be known as Intestine City and Potworów, Poland, would become Monsterville. Next time you are in Germany, definitely spend time in Kuhbier or Drogen, and consider buying a postcard saying you’ve been to Cow Beer and Drugs. (Apparently Drogen is plagued by tourists stealing their traffic signs as souvenirs!)

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It reminded me, however, that translations matter. The Internet is awash with wonderful stories about how world affairs were influenced by an incorrect translation, from Jimmy Carter’s famous expression of sexual desire for Poland —  “I desire the Poles carnally” — to JFK proudly announcing to the Germans that he was a doughnut — “Ich bin ein Berliner!” More serious blunders included the mistranslation of Khrushchev during the Cold War that escalated tensions between the superpowers, or a misunderstanding of Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki’s wartime comments that may have led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If it is true that the Bible is the most widely published and distributed work on the planet, then it stands to reason that translations there matter too. St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, is said to have studied Hebrew specifically so that he could translate the Old Testament into Latin, instead of the usual Greek. In so doing, however, his account generated a rather famous error. Misreading the Hebrew word ‘karan’, meaning radiance, he instead translated the word as ‘keren’, meaning horned. This led to centuries of renditions of Moses — and by extension Jews — as horned figures. “When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai his head had horns.”

Needless to say, the Bible is understood as the divinely inspired Word of God, but there is no doubt that how those words were translated by mere mortals is clearly and evidently significant. The King James Bible was specifically commissioned by that monarch because he believed The Geneva Bible, possibly the most authoritative and generally available version at the time, was overly republican. Many have argued that the King James is inflected to ‘give credence to the structure of the Church of England and its clergy.’

The translation variations in the Bible are many and varied, from politically inflected changes to the misunderstanding of core words. What is certain, however, is that through it all the central power of the faith has survived millennia of iterations, misinterpretations and more, and translations have brought the sacred text to the world. 

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As Salman Rushdie once said, “It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.” Whatever the vagaries of the human touch, it is difficult to deny that the sacred survives whatever we throw at it and always shines through the complexity and uncertainty of our human comprehension. 

In the end God’s word rings true wherever it is received, from Drogen to Monsterville and beyond.