Today on the bus from work I got into a discussion with a Russian co-worker. She told me two things that’s I’d really like independant corroboration of:[ul][li]There’s a phrase in the original Greek version of the Bible that cannot be accurately translated into English, but can be translated into Russian. The meaning has something to do with ‘anointing’.There was a ‘miraculous’ translation of the Bible from the original Greek into a ‘Jewish language’. Twenty translators at a monastery worked on it independently. When the twenty separate translations were compared, they matched word for word, so obviously the Hand of God was guiding the translators.[/ul]My co-worker could not give me much greater details about these items. In particular, she did not know which Jewish language the translation was made into: Yiddish, Ladino, etc.[/li]
Any of our experts on religious affairs know the sources of these beliefs?
Regarding the first point, there are certainly languages that, for various reasons, permit easier translation between them for some phrases. For example, Ancient Greek did not have merely singular and plural, they also had a separate number, dual, that referred specifically to two objects. Obviously, if a current language also has a dual number, a translation of a Greek phrase conataining a dual will be more readily rendered into that language than into English. However, English is quite capable of handling the concept of two objects and one can certainly find a way to express any Greek phrase containing a dual in English. Through the efforts of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Greek characters were the basis of the written languages of Eastern Europe and I would not be surprised to find that such developments influenced the ways in which modern Russian developed. (In addition, the proto-Russians, the Rus, had a lengthy history of trade with the Byzantine Empire that probably influenced the development of modern Russian.) That there is some phrase (or multiple words or phrases) that are more readily rendered between Koine Greek and modern Russian would not surprise me. However, I doubt that there is a thought expressed in Greek that cannot be rendered in English.
Given that I know of no bibles that have a note “The following Greek phrase in not translatable,” followed by a line in Greek, I can only assume that your acquaintance preferred the Russian rendering, but that does not invalidate any English translation that is not, itself, poorly done.
As to the second point, I would simply like to state Bwahahahahahahaha!
There are any number of legends about miraculous translations. They are legends, only, and have no basis in reality.
OF course, one has to wonder why the Bible was being translated from Greek to Hebrew/Yiddish/Ladino in the first place. The Tanakh/Old Testament was written in Hebrew (leaving aside some discussions/debates about originally Aramaic or Greek passages in a few later books), so what was being translated? The New Testament was written in Greek, and, while I am sure that someone has translated it into Hebrew at some point, (to proselytize Jews, if nothing else), there is no “Hebrew” New Testament that stands as some ikon of the faith.
With respect to the second point, it sounds like a garbled version of the legend about the translation of the Septuagint, except that was a translation of the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew into Greek.
Regarding the first point.
There are always certain words and phrases that cannot be translated exactly from one language to another, with the possible exception of certain closely related languages that have just been separated. Maybe Chinese-Japanese-Korean, or maybe Chinese-Vietnamese.
Sometimes this leads to interesting dualities in translations. A Latin translation of the bible uses the word ‘cornutus’ (radiant) in relation to moses coming down the mountain. Unfortunately, ‘cornutus’ also means ‘horned’. Michelangelo, who was familiar with the Latin version of the bible, actually made a famous statue of Moses… with horns.
I wonder how the perusal of an interlinear translation of the New Testament (such as the Emphatic Diaglott by Benjamin Wilson, published by Fowler & Wells in 1865) would affect this.
Urban Ranger writes:
> There are always certain words and phrases that cannot be
> translated exactly from one language to another, with the
> possible exception of certain closely related languages that
> have just been separated. Maybe Chinese-Japanese-Korean,
> or maybe Chinese-Vietnamese.
Say what? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are all unrelated to each other. (Well, some linguists think that Japanese and Korean might be distantly related to Altaic, but that’s not the majority opinion.)
Hey, I can think of words in closely related languages, e.g. English and American, that don’t translate properly. 
The Talmud (in Megillah) relates a similar story about the creation of the Septuagint. In short, 70 scholars (not 6 from each tribe, as this happened well after the Ten Tribes were exiled and lost) were hired to translate the Pentatuch into Greek. They each worked alone, yet all produced the same translation. Even more miraculously, they each made about fifteen changes to the text (lest they be misunderstood) and all 70 made the exact same changes.
Zev Steinhardt