Let me give you some examples from our recent work in John. John chapter 9 is about Jesus healing a man born blind. When the disciples saw the blind man, they asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” Jesus’ answer was, literally translated, “neither this man sinned nor his parents.” But of course, there is some implied information that is not literally mentioned; Jesus was not making a statement to the effect that the man and his parents had never sinned. To keep from giving the wrong idea, we translated this in Arli as “He is not blind because he sinned or his father or mother” (there is no Arli word for “parents”). This makes it clear that Jesus’ answer was limited to the immediate context of the cause of blindness; he was not making a declaration of the man’s complete sinlessness.

Here’s another example. John 9:24 says literally, “So a second time they called the man who had been blind, and said to him, ‘Give glory to God; we know that this man is a sinner.'” However, in this context, the Pharisees were not piously asking the healed man to give a testimony that glorified God. They were using an Old Testament phrase that was used when a judge thought that the accused was lying or hiding something. They thought the blind man was not telling the truth, so they were, in a sense, putting him under oath. To bring out this meaning, we translated this in the Chergash language as “Promise before God that you will tell the truth.” This communicates the correct meaning, whereas a literal rending, “Give glory to God” gives an entirely wrong impression. (I have even seen this part of the verse used out of context on a devotional calendar page!)

John 12:44 begins, “And Jesus cried out and said, ‘He who believes…'” Taken literally, it looks like it is describing two separate actions: Jesus cried out and Jesus also said. But this is a very common Semitic way of describing a speech action and is only referring to one action, so in Chergash, we translated it as “And Jesus shouted these words, ‘Whoever believes…'”

The verse goes on to say, “Whoever believes does not believe in me, but in the one who sent me. “ We are not to take this literally as if Jesus said that whoever believes in him does not believe in him! He is explaining to the disciples how intricately related he is to the Father, such that someone who believed in Jesus thereby also believed in Jesus’ Father who sent him. To make this clearer, in the Arli and Gurbet translations, we added the word “only” so that the verse now says, “Whoever believes in me, does not believe only in me, but also in the one who sent me.”