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Key to the Open English Translation

The Open English Translation of the Bible is not tied to tradition (and especially not to traditional mistakes or misunderstandings) so it has a number of changes from more common Bible translations.

We also aim to educate our readers better about how our Bibles get to us and we have many different kinds of links on the site, so that’s a second reason why it differs from usual, and hence requires this key to explain some of the features.

Note that the OET is being drafted with UK spelling and so we favour those editions on this site, but an edition will also be produced in the future with US spellings (plus any necessary wording changes).

The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament)^*

We are experimenting in the OET-RV with marking parallel Hebrew poetry lines with the symbol ≈. English tends to use rhyming for poetry (and rap is extreme rhyming), but we can also use things like shorter line/sentence lengths instead. Hebrew poetry tends to use parallelism—shortish pairs of lines where the second line might say almost the same thing using synonyms, etc., or it might say the opposite thing (or it might just conclude the thought/argument). Wherever, we believe that we have a retelling of almost the same thought in poetry, we try to assist the reader to see this by preceding the second line with the ≈ character (the mathematical ‘approximately equal’ sign).

More to come...

^* The OET avoids the word ‘Testament’ because it’s not used in modern English (except perhaps by lawyers), plus we dislike ‘Old’ and ‘New’ because ‘new’ might (wrongly) imply that the ‘old’ is no longer required. Note that the terms ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ don’t occur in any ancient manuscripts.

The Messianic Update (New Testament)

Still coming...

The OET Literal Version

The OET-LV aims to be a word-for-word correspondence with the original source manuscripts (mostly Hebrew and Greek), although with the word-order revised to make it easier for English readers to understand.

In order to be as transparent to our readers as possible, we use various text formats to indicate various decisions that have been made. The following are the various text formats in the OET-LV:

• Sample: ‘the’ represents words in the original language which usually remain untranslated in English. The Greek case-marker/definite-article is a common example of this because it would be quite unnatural to say something like ‘said to the Peter’ in English. The Hebrew direct-object-marker ‘DOM’ is another example of a word not required to be translated into English. However, we want to highlight to our readers the original language words which are being dropped from the OET literal translation.
• Sample: ‘the’ represents articles (like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘some’) that weren’t in the original language but which had to be added to make the English sound natural.
• Sample: ‘is’ represents a helping word known as a copula (like ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘are’) that the original language doesn’t have but which had to be added to make the English make sense.
• Sample: ‘the sheep’ represents a word we had to add because the English verb is transitive and requires a direct object, even if the original didn’t (perhaps because it was elided, i.e., omitted the second time rather than being repeated). For example, you can say ‘Jesus wept’ (intransitive verb), but ‘Jesus told’ (transitive verb) is incomplete in English, so we might need to add ‘him’.
• Sample: ‘the thing’ or ‘the one’ represents words that weren’t in the original language but which had to be added to make the English make sense, e.g., ‘the ones who went’. (Depending on the context, the missing word could have been ‘people’, ‘men’, or even something like ‘donkeys’.)

More coming...

Note: Most other literal English versions don’t indicate these kinds of changes to their readers, even though they’ve also had to make them.

The OET Readers’ Version

The OET-RV aims to be a easy-to-read-and-understand modern-Englishword translation of the original source manuscripts (mostly Hebrew and Greek). It’s NOT intended to be a ‘paraphrase’, although any decent translation does require the rephrasing of original segments for a range of linguistic and cultural reasons (since our aim is for the message of the original writers to be understood as much as possible).

• Sample: ‘two’ represents English words that the translators have added to help or remind the readers, e.g., ‘the two brothers’).
• Sample: ‘David’ is used when a pronoun (like ‘he’, ‘it’, ‘you’, or ‘those’) is replaced with its referent, i.e., the person(s) or object(s) being referred to. There are several reasons why this might be done, but the main two are:
  1. The addition of a section heading (or even sometimes, a paragraph) which means that the reader might jump in at that point, not having read the previous context.
  2. Differences in sentence and discourse structure between modern-English and the original languages
  It should be noted that well over 99% of these substitutions are quite obvious, however there are some cases where the original is technically ambiguous, but it seems clear who or what is the referent. If it’s not clear, we will either try to make the best decision, or else, leave it ambiguous for the reader.
• Sample: ‘she’ is used when a pronoun is used instead of the full form, e.g., ‘it’ instead of ‘the white horse’. This is usually done to adhere to the norms of English fluency.
• Sample: ‘But’ is used when a word, phrase, or clause is reworded so there's no longer a close match to the original words, e.g., ‘the tribes of Reuben and Gad’ instead of ‘the Reubenite and the Gadite’. (Josh 13:8) This is usually done to give better English fluency and understanding.
• Sample: ‘in the clouds’ represents a word or phrase where we really can’t determine what the original author was probably trying to say. Sometimes we lack cultural understanding, sometimes it’s a rarely used original language word, and sometimes the original phrase or sentence just doesn’t seem to make sense in the context. Note that this formatting can also be combined with some of the above formats like ‘thing’.
• Sample: ‘Once there was a man with…’ is used for anything that it seems that Yeshua/Jesus actually spoke. (There’s no speech marks in the original manuscripts, so some interpretation decisions are required.) Although the invention of red-letter Bibles was possibly a sales booster technique from the late 1800’s, it is popular with some readers (although we consider that it also might be a distraction from understanding the context of the direct speech, hence we use a less prominent colour than red.) With modern display (and even printing) technologies, the OET team plan to also use colour to mark direct speech from other speakers in the future (although we also plan to make it possible for online readers to disable it).

More coming...

Note: Most older English Bible translations use italics to indicate added words, even though most other English literature uses italics for emphasis (not for things like added words which should actually be ‘deemphasised’).

Note: Most other English Bible translations don’t indicate the other kinds of changes to their readers, even though they’ve also had to make them. The OET-RV displays them because it’s intended for serious study, but we also plan to make ways to hide these details for easy and undistracted reading.

Technical readers might wish to view the encoding conventions used to mark these various features in our ESFM files.

Transliterations

The OET uses a unique set of characters for transliterating Hebrew and Greek characters, taking advantage of the modern Unicode character set which is now available to us. This has the disadvantage of being different from the transliterations commonly used in academia, but the advantage of being designed with the less technical reader in mind, i.e., we’ve tried to make it easier for the non-expert who’s familiar with the English alphabet to guess at the sound of the letter. We’ve also tried to take advantage of single Unicode characters like æ and ʦ to represent two English letters as a match for the single letters in the other languages.

Long vowels are indicated with the macron over the vowel, i.e., ‘ā ē ī ō ū’ versus the normal ‘a e i o u’.

More to come...

Names of people and places

Imagine that your mother named you ‘Charlotte’ (pronounced shar-lot) after your grandmother, but when you moved to another country where they weren’t so familiar with the name, people there read it and pronounced it as char-lot-tee. You’d basically have two choices:

1. Correct them and tell them that you are shar-lot not char-lot-tee, or
2. Just put up with it and hope your mother never visits that place or she’d be horrified.

If you’d choose #1 above, imagine that your name was Yacobos but all English Bible readers called you James, which is totally and utterly different from your real name. Would it bug you? If it would, hopefully you’ll appreciate the OET more than those people who’d have chosen #2.

The OET can make us uncomfortable if we’re happy to continue to mispronounce people’s names. If that’s you, please just continue to enjoy your old Bible. But if you’d prefer to be more considerate to others, then make the effort to pronounce their names better, even if it’s hard for us now to get those old, wrong names out of our minds.

Other

Omitted verses are marked with the character ◘ (with a link to our missing verses page) to indicate that we didn’t accidentally miss translating it. The reason why such verses are not included is usually because the original language text was missing in the oldest manuscripts and thus believed to be a later addition in later copies.

More to come...