Daniel 5:5 and why word-for-word translation isn't always the best

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I'm currently going through Daniel in my own personal Bible study, and I'll probably post my thoughts and observations on the book when I'm done, but I wanted to make a minor post now concerning the wording of Daniel 5:5 which is part of the writing on the wall story.  In describing the writer, the verse says it was "אֶצְבְּעָן דִּי יַד־אֱנָשׁ" which translated word for word is "fingers of a man's hand".  Pretty much every major English translation does this phrase word for word, even those that don't have a word for word translation philosophy. This is clunky English compared to "human fingers" but it's needed in the original Aramaic for clarity since the word for finger is also used for toe. I'm generally a word-for-word guy myself, since it helps preserve original idioms, but there's no idiom to be preserved here, so I see no reason why "human fingers" or even "a man's fingers" if one doesn't want to presume that a specific gender was not being specified in the original shouldn't be the translation.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

http://biblehub.com/daniel/5-5.htm

A lot of translations seem to use "fingers of a human hand".

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

http://biblehub.com/daniel/5-5.htm

A lot of translations seem to use "fingers of a human hand".

You seem to have missed my point, which wasn't about whether to use gender neutral language, but rather whether it is desirable to mention "hand" at that point in an English translation or simply go to "human fingers" or "a man's fingers" depending on one's views on using gender neutral language.  I was contending that it was not.

[anvi]

I don't know Hebrew, but I often do translations, or at least partial translations of texts, from other languages.  I guess I'm at least currently at the point where I think the call to translate phrases or sentences word-for-word or adjust to the grammar and idiom of the target language should be made on a case-by-case basis.  There are times when I've found it's much. much better to stick with a word-for-word rendition, not just to preserve original idioms--which is always nice--, but also since they actually clarify the meanings of certain sentences much better than translators who adapt them in various ways.  However, there are also cases where there is just no point in word-for-word renditions.

In Sanskrit, for example, the active construction of a sentence, with a subject-active verb-object form, is often less common than sentences where the main verb expresses the action of an agent which is in the instrumental grammatical case, while the real or implied object of the action is in the nominative.  These latter kinds of sentences read very naturally in Sanskrit.  But I just don't see the virtue in being too literalist about it.  I'll just go ahead and render the sentence: "the boy slept under the tree" instead of word-for-word, which would be: "(It) is slept by the boy under the tree." 

I know your case is just about a phrase, but to me, that would be the same kind of thing; no need to be overly cumbersome in English when you can express the same meaning more naturally, at least in cases of sentences where no emphasis or poetic expression is involved.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

'Fingers of a man's hand' isn't clunky, it's poetic.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

'Fingers of a man's hand' isn't clunky, it's poetic.

If it were part of a poetic passage, I could see the desire to be clunkily poetic, but it's not part of such a passage, and whether the phrase is poetic is a matter of taste.