VERSION OF BIBLE AND THEOLOGY OF WESTERN CHDRCH. 135 



(not Jerome's later translation direct from the Hebrew) which 

 appears in the modern Vulgate Bible. The Psalter was 

 apparently followed by revised translations of the other books of 

 the Old Testament from the LXX, though very few of these are 

 now extant, and gradually Jerome settled down to his biggest 

 task of all — the translation of the Old Testament direct from 

 the Hebrew — and this occupied him till after 404. The Vulgate 

 Bible is therefore a composite work ; in the New Testament it is 

 a revision of existing Latin translations by the aid of the 

 original Greek ; in the Old Testament it is partly a revision of 

 older work by reference to the LXX version, mostly, however, a 

 translation direct from the Hebrew. 



In considering any version of any book, we must bear in mind 

 that no version can express its original exactly ; everything loses 

 by translation. That; is quite true ; but there is another sense 

 in which it may be said that everything gains by translation : 

 for every translation is also an interpretation, a commentary ; 

 it puts into the original more than it found there. Two transla- 

 tors, indifferent honest, but holding diametrically opposed 

 opinions, and holding them strongly, would produce very 

 divergent translations of a treatise on the subject about which 

 they differed. 



But in translating a book, the translator will be met by 

 words for which he can provide no exact equivalent ; it is not so 

 much his fault as the fault of his language. Or again, the mean- 

 ing of a word may alter, and what was a fair translation at the 

 time may be a misleading one a thousand years later. Or the 

 original may be ambiguous or vague ; the translator has to select 

 one out of several meanings of a word, or he has to interpret an 

 expression in order to make it intelligible ; sometimes an officious 

 scribe will add a marginal note to a text, and this interprets or 

 amplifies its meaning, and is in time incorporated into the text. 

 Sometimes the translator with strong views goes further ; he is 

 convinced that the phrase he has to translate, cannot, does not, 

 represent the author's real mind ; there must be, there is, an 

 obvious mistake, and he feels it his bounden duty to rectify this 

 in his translation ; in plain English he deliberately mistranslates 

 in defence of his own theories ; and he puts down not what the 

 author said, but what he would have said had he been in the 

 author's place. There is the case, too, of proper names, plays 

 upon words, etc. ; if these are reproduced literally in a transla- 

 tion they lose their meaning ; but it is difficult to translate them 

 without doing much more, i.e., interpreting them. While finally, 



