Jason David BeDuhn presents a rather good summary of problems every Biblical translation should tackle, compares the quality of a sample of different translations when it comes to accuracy and bias, and presents a hypothesis as to why the translations he found best did considerably better than the others.
The book's chapters go through a short summary of the history of English translations and textual criticism, an introduction to how translators go about their work and different major approaches to it, a survey of major English translations - what approaches they've used, to what extent they seem consistent, etc.
He also explains the problems of translating poems and metaphors - especially from a culture so alien to what we are used to.
Then he gets to the meat of the matter: a series of particular New Testament verses that contain possibly contentious wordings are compared - he discusses the Greek usage and expectations - essentially trying to get to what a reader reading the NT when it was written would get out of it - and comparing whether the translators have injected ideas of their own or distorted the picture a bit.
The details are interesting: some Bibles change the gender of some persons (probably to reduce the appearance of women having any authority whatsoever in the early church), some do great violence to Greek grammar and semantics to inject or radically alter christologies (the KJV even forces the opposite meaning out of one passage) or doctrines of the Holy Spirit. Other maybe less interesting examples also surface, but those two genres of mistranslation are probably the most notable ones.
Conclusions of the book? Most critics of translations don't know what they're talking about and just compare it to their favorite translation. This favoritism seldom is based on fact, but rather on familiarity or doctrine. Another interesting conclusion is that almost all translations use suspect translating to bolster up some doctrine. Finally, the two best translations out of the sample, with some caveats for the latter, is the Catholic New American Bible and the Jeho-ah's Witnesses' New World Translation. The author surmises that this is due to the sola scriptura-doctrine in protestantism: since all doctrine is to be derived from the Bible, doctrines that actually aren't in it have been forced into the text to make them seem properly derived from it. The Catholics do not believe in sola scriptura, and thus can be all relaxed even if their doctrines aren't found in there, and the Jeho-ah's Witnesses have made a more decisive break with traditions of the church and genuinely try to figure out what the Bible says rather than tell it what to say - although there are examples where the translators have weakened the christology in the NT, as well as the rather consistent over-use of the tetragrammaton throughout. Of course, this is based on a limited number of samples, but since these were of rather varied nature, there's no big reason to think that the
The author warns us that the Living Bible and the Amplified Bible are not properly speaking translations, but rather paraphrases that insert a lot of material very freely into the text, potentially misleading the reader. Even then, both the LB and AB on occasion get things right where most of the others get them wrong, so there seems to be no single Bible that has the worst result in every verse compared.
Although it is a book that says a lot of things that are obvious to anyone with some solid foundations in linguistics, these things probably are not obvious to everyone. The further examples demonstrate the risks more clearly, and the kinds of misleading a translator can accidentally or intentionally perpetuate. An important point made a few times is that a translation primarily must be judged by how well it conveys the meaning of the original text. The meaning is of course not a thing multiple readers all will agree on, but something close enough should be possible for the reader to glean - without the reader gleaning much more or much less than the original text warrants. Most who compare, criticize or even reject biblical translations completely lack this expertise, and should just shut up. However, mostly it's exactly those who make the most noise - a phenomenon I recall from the Bible 2000 vs Folkbibeln debacle in Swedish-speaking Christianity.
Another thing that would interest me is a similar treatment of the Old Testament, preferably also comparing Jewish translations. In that case, of course, Masoretic vs Septuagint vs Vulgate (vs Targum vs probably something Coptic vs ... ) would be relevant, and that might be too great a scope for a similar book, though.
I would recommend this book for anyone with a vested interest in the Bible who is unable to read it in the original languages.
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