Wednesday, August 03, 2005

About translating a verse from the bible

In order to translate a verse from the bible into another language the best is to find the verse (in Hebrew, in my case) and then enter as key words the location of the verse.

For example: I thought that the concept of God is so ubiquitous that it will be very difficult to search for somebody who doesn't know it. This is probably an example of a known needle in an unknown haystack . Then I remembered vaguely that in the Bible there is a verse about this… something like people said to me where your God is? So I entered the keywords "where your God is" (in Hebrew) and got the verse I needed on Psalms 42:3. Then I entered the location Psalms 42:3 and got it in English:

My tears have been my food day and night, while they continually say to me,
Where [is] thy God?

At dinner I spoke about all this and one of my guests, a young girl, told me that she played in Brecht's Mahogany in Hebrew and there was a dialog where the good guy said something about God and the bad guy asked: God who?

I reckon if I'll go to an autistic and ask "who is God?" I might get the answer "Who is Who", but as far as searching the Web is the question I think this is a good example of a difficult search, no matter which search engine you choose.

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