34
SUGGESTIONS FOR TRANSLATORS,
the reader's mind the simplest elements of revealed truth. But when a Christian Church has been formed, and men have become habituated to the reading of the Scriptures, it is right to adopt all legitimate means to ensure the accurate reading of God's Word. A careful revision of the version is usually made at such a time, and the question arises whether any mode of marking the supplementary words should be adopted. The original editions of the Authorised Version were printed in black letter, and the supplementary words were printed in small Roman letters ; but the italic or running character was substituted for these when the body of the book was printed in Roman letter. This course would have been a very good one were it not the fact that italics are used in almost all other books to denote the emphatic words in a sentence. Two other plans have been resorted to by translators into foreign languages: one is to put the accessory words in brackets ; the other. to print them in smaller type than the rest-as in the modern Greek Bibles printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society. In any case a line of explanation ought to be given at the foot of the page in which the first supplementary word occurs, or (better still) beneath the Table of Contents, so that readers may understand the object of the peculiarity in the text. Supposing that a translator has determined to adopt one or other of these modes for marking the accessory words in his version, it remains for him to consider what words ought to be so marked. It is often thought that the translators or editors of the English Bible have been too scrupulous in this respect, and that our Bibles are overladen with italics. Many things are implied in the original which must from the necessities of language be exP'ressed in the translation. These need not be marked as accessory. The only cases where supplementary words ought to be marked in order to guard the reader against a misapprehension, are. first, when there is some ambiguity in the original owing to its conciseness, so that the translator is obliged to exercise his discretion in completing the sentence ; secondly, when a word is absent from the.. original, not through the necessities of the language, but through the choice of the inspired writer. In these cases it is certainly desirable, at any rate for advanced readers, to distinguish between what is fixed by the sacred original and what is left open to the human interpreter. The following instances, taken from the Authorised English Version, will illustrate the use of italics, and can be applied, 1nutatis mutandis, to other versions. (i.) The copula, or auxiliary verb, is usually omitted in Hebrew, but expressed in English. There would be no need, however, to put it in italics were it not left to the discretion of the trans-
