Amharic Translators Playing Games With 1 Peter

My sister, who studied Italian and linguistics for a time, told me that there is a play on words that is something to the effect of, "translator, traitor" in Italian. The difficulty of translation is a brute fact we must all deal with. We don't all know every langauge. That would be nice. But, when we translate anything we should meticulously consider the original context as much as is humanly possible.

There are two main Amharic translations of Scripture in usage by the EOTC. The first is a 1980s translation and the second is a 2000s translation. Both of them have moments in which they take their liberty with the words of Scripture to either add, remove, or edit a word or a line that may lead to a controversial understanding. The 2000s version does this in many places, but the 1980s version is not 100% innocent of this. The good thing is that the authors have some sort of reluctance or hesitance, perhaps because they know how many human eyes are watching, as they do this. Where they stray from the original in a way noticeable to laity and scholars alike, they make a footnote that says, "the Greek says..."

Rather than having a footnote that says, "the Greek says...", they should properly translate the Greek and have a footnote exegeting the verse or word in question. In 1 Peter 1:3 the Greek and English read

eulogetos ho theos kai pater ho hemeis kyrios ieosous christos...Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (MOUNCE)

The 1980s Amharic translation from the EOTC reads,

yegetytachin yeeeyesus kristos abat yibarek... blessed be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ

but the footnote for verse 3 reads,

begreeku  "yegeytachin yeeeyesus kristos amlak ina abat" yilal... in the Greek it says, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ"

The Newer Testament was written in Greek, with a drizzling of Aramaic (not to be confused with Amharic although both are Semitic). Greek is the authoritative tongue. There are no excuses. Controversy or not, we should not be in the business of altering the data to fit our own agenda. That being said, before the Church canonized the 27 books of the NT there was some altering of the data by scribes of the Church who preserved this literature for us in the first place. Anyhoo, as I said above, if this 1 Peter 1:3 needs extra explaining, then we should do that in the footnote. The footnote is no place for the accurate translation whilst we inaccurately translate in the main body of the text.

May God help all translators of His word to be faithful in transmitting His life-giving message.


Post Scriptum:

Sadly, my Eritrean Catholic Ge'ez translation of 1 Peter 1:3 says,

yitbarek igzeeabheyr abuhu leigzeeine eeyesus kristos... blessed be God (the Lord of the nation) the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This differs in that there are no footnotes referencing a more accurate Greek rendering, and God (the Father) is the subject as opposed to the predicate.

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