Since its appearance in 1998, The New Korean Revised Version (NKRV) has been the de facto standard Bible for the pulpit and personal use among Korean Christians. While the newly launched revision project of the NKRV for the 21st century is expected to be a fairly conservative ‘minimal revision’ in scope, the Korean Bible Society (KBS) recently published the New Korean Translation (NKT), a new translation aspiring to be both next generation friendly and accurate, as the KBS-sanctioned alternative translation for the public. The NKT has brought some major changes in translation philosophy including a rather dramatic shift in treating word order in translation Hebrew and Greek sentences into fluid contemporary Korean diction. As expected, this change has raised concerns for the ‘accuracy’ of the NKT and has spurred some heated debates among scholars and pastors. This study focuses on some key passages in Job to test how the NKT stands up against the NKRV in its linguistic and exegetical details.
Upon examining sixteen passages from Job (1:1, 3; 6:15; 8:13; 9:2; 11:6, 12; 17:16; 19:17; 20:3; 22:16; 26:7; 29:1, 4; 31:13; 36:3), the NKT appears quite impressive in attaining its stated goal of accuracy and readability, not just for the next generation but also for the general public. For example, in the NKT Job 1:1 introduces “(There was) a man in the land of Uz” before “Job was his name”, in a rather distinct syntactic structure and Korean sentence style that is not found in the numerous Korean versions of the past. Upon examination, the NKT closely resembles the word order of the Hebrew original. In its publication, KBS explains that the sizable number of inverted sentences in the NKT text is not merely a stylistic choice, but rather a concerted effort to reflect the communicative effect in the Korean word order and its communicative effect in the original language. This new approach has been well received by the younger generation who are more open to style variation including word order in the ‘biblical text’ in both the private and public setting. The older population, however, is more reluctant to these changes.
It is suggested, therefore, to go beyond promoting the NKT as a Bible translation for the next generation and encourage its use as one side of the NKRB-NKT bitextual ‘canon’ for Korean churches, both from the pulpit and at home. If the two versions are routinely read, recited, and studied side by side, the public biblical literacy and appreciation will improve. The generation that uses the NKT and the NRKV in this complimentary way will be a blessed generation that will reap from their heightened awareness and depend knowledge of the truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures.