Today is international translation day - words matter!

Thanks to Jane Stranz for letting us know; read more at Today is international translation day - words matter!

and, before you go, here are a couple of my favorite "daily" "bread" translations:

"Keep giving us tomorrow's bread today and do so on a daily basis"
--Gospel of Matthew (from the Lord's Prayer), trans. by Ann Nyland

"The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman. She took a little yeast. She buried it in dough. She made the dough into large bread loaves. Whoever has ears should listen!"
--Gospel of Thomas 96, trans. by April DeConick

Women Count in Bible Translation

UPDATEs:

• I've added links to personal websites of the women translators listed here.
  
• Linda L. Belleville; Joyce Baldwin Caine; Marianne Meye Thompson; added to the list below (thanks to Suzanne McCarthy's directing us to Tremper Longman III's blogpost "Who cares who translated my Bible?" where he asks "So why does the NLT list the names of its ninety translators?" These translators are the 3 women woman of the team of 90).
• Phyllis A. Bird; J. Cheryl Exum; Mary Lucetta Mowry; Katharine D. Sakenfeld all added (thanks to Paul Larson, commenting at BBB. These translators are the 4 women on the NRSV team of 30.)
  
• And as any of you give recognition to other women translators of the Bible, I'll update further.

Just a quick post here for a few reasons:
1) Women who've translated the Bible are getting recognition by several bloggers;
2) Some men are saying that women "seriously" lessen the "merits" of their Bible translations when they identify themselves as women translators (or are identified by others as women);
3) The whole of Julia E. Smith's translation is freely available online for you to read and study.

1) Here are women translators of the Bible and where bloggers are discussing them:

• Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Suzanne McCarthy has offered comments on or excerpts from Sidney here, here, and here. (And I've mentioned Sidney here, here, and here.)
• Jane Aitken. McCarthy notes here that Aitken "is not a woman bible translator but" facilitates Bible translation as "[o]ne of the first American female printers. . . [and] also a bookseller, bookbinder, businesswoman, and employer during the early nineteenth century, a time when the independence of women was actively discouraged."
  
• Julia Evelina Smith. McCarthy's post is here. (My notes on Smith are here).
• Helen Spurrell. Rick Mansfield at ElShaddai Edward's blog inspires McCarthy's post here.
• Helen Barrett Montgomery. Mansfield mentions Montgomery, and McCarthy add this post here.
• Annie Cressman. McCarthy writes here, here, and here.
• Frances Siewert. Edwards posts here.
• Ann Nyland. Edwards offers a bit of a round up of some of the posts I'm mentioning here, and he points to a couple of posts on Nyland's translation. McCarthy posts here and here, comments here, and refers to an article by Nyland here. Wayne Leman posts here, and he offers an interview with Nyland here. Peter Kirk posts here. (I say a few things here, and give an excerpt of Nyland's translation here.)
  
• Karen H. Jobes. Leman posts here and here. John F. Hobbins here and here; Kirk here; and James Getz here. (I've remarked here.)
• Beth Shepperd. (I've linked here to the site listing Shepperd, the only woman on a translation team of men).
• Linda Belleville. Some time back, Michael Kruse republished here four paragraphs from Belleville's “Teaching and Usurping Authority” an essay in Discovering Biblical Equality. Andreas J. Köstenberger critiques Belleville's work here. TC Robinson compares Belleville's views with certain mens' here. McCarthy posts here.
• Joyce Baldwin Caine. Valerie Griffith writes on the late Baldwin Caine.
• Marianne Meye Thompson. Chris Tilling posts here. Wes Kendall says she and her husband "helped guide me through my final years of seminary and helped prepare me for pastoral ministry." Nijay K. Gupta says that Marianne Meye Thompson is most qualified to contribute to Greg Beale’s and D.A. Carson’s (eds) Commentary on the NT Use of the Old Testament; Gupta also wishes Karen Jobes and Linda Belleville were in the book but notes "no women" are in the work.
  
• Phyllis Bird. Mindawati Peranginganging posts some here (in English). Shawna R. B. Attenbury posts here sentences from Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities (Overtures to Biblical Theology).
  
• J. Cheryl Exum. Ivoy mentions one of her theories here. Steve R. McEnvoy finds her doing something wonderful here. Karl Möller highlights Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)Versions of Biblical Narratives here.
• Lucetta Mowry. Will no one blog on Mowry and her Poetry in the Synoptic Gospels and Revelation: A Study of Methods and Materials and her The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church?
• Katharine D. Sakenfeld. Larry Corbett took sermon notes from Sakenfeld, but is no one blogging about her works these days?
  
• Joann Haugarud.  Here, I quote Louise Von Flowtow-Evans, who mentions and quotes Haugarud's The Word for Us: The Gospels of John and Mark, Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, Restated in Inclusive Language.

2) In the conversation after Edward's post on Siewart, there is the suggestion that a Bible translation is diminished when the translator is shown to be a woman.

Kirk says, "I think Ann would be unhappy to have The Source [i.e., her translation] listed as a translation by a woman because she wants it to be taken seriously on its own merits."

Edwards replies, "I agree that we shouldn’t qualify any translation work as by 'a woman', though I find it ironic that many translation committees seem to be under pressure from some quarters to include a wide sample of minority voices, including women and non-white ethnicities. It’s hugely ironic to me that on one hand we want a meritocracy that recognizes superior work as such, regardless of who did it, while on the other we want to give equal weighting to work from a diversity of backgrounds, regardless of quality."

Makes us wonder whether these two men have read (and believe) what Nyland writes in her More Than Meets The Eye: THE CAMPAIGN TO CONTROL GENDER TRANSLATION BIBLES.

Makes us listen more closely to how Julia E. Smith begins the Preface to her translation of the Bible:

"It may seem presumptious for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world, and thought to be the most difficult to translate. . . . Over twenty years ago, when I had four sisters, a friend met with us weekly, to search the Scriptures, we being desirous to learn . . . . We saw by the margin that the text [of the King James's forty-seven translators] had not been . . . . I had studied Latin and Greek at school, and began by translating the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint. . . . I soon gave my attention to the Hebrew, and studied it thoroughly. . . "

Makes us wonder a little more at why Francis Ellen Burr and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women in The Women’s Bible make such a big deal out of being women, translators.

3) The whole of Julia E. Smith's translation is freely available online for you to read and study. Here it is!