Translation Commitments
The LIT is a historical, literary translation from the original languages, guided by a set of commitments about meaning, power, harm, and hope. They're the constraints that keep the work honest, the principles that guide how I weigh clarity, accuracy, and harm.
Faithfulness to the text
I want the original voices of the scriptures to speak in their own strange way, trying to be true to both the Greek and English, and the literary purposes of the text. Metaphors and image-words in the Greek text (e.g. “deviations”) will be used in place of stodgy technical terms (e.g. “sin”). This is also a translation, not a paraphrase or midrash. Extended elaborations are saved for footnotes rather than the translation.
Avoid religious technical language
Two thousand years of beautiful tradition clutter our hearing. Paul’s informal phrases have calcified into formal religious jargon by repetition, sticking in our minds and our churches like glue. Entire libraries of rigid theological meaning have been drafted trying to fix in place words that used to have more informality and flexibility. I’m trying to recover that and make it accessible without a theology degree.
Read with the oppressed
The Bible, as an oppressed people’s sacred library, is steadily critical of power dynamics. When it appears to endorse the powerful, we read with the marginalized, such as our LGBTQ and BIPOC kin. People are always the priority over ideas. We discern the truth of theology by how it impacts the most vulnerable, not accepting or rejecting people based on fitting our theology and cultural norms.
Trauma-informed translation
Therapy is my day job. So I’m painfully aware of the traumatizing legacy that other translations and people’s interpretations of them have developed. I attempt to translate from a non-shaming, compassionate, body-affirming, empathy-soaked posture. Transparency is key. Learning from those who have been harmed the most is essential. Passages with a legacy of abuse are translated to minimize harm without sidestepping meaning.
God always looks like Jesus
Every translator expresses their theology in the work of translating—neutrality is a myth. So where other translators insert their assumptions of an all-dominating, fame-seeking, power-hungry, violent, authoritarian God into the Bible, I lean on my belief that God is Christlike through and through. It’s what I use for tie-breakers in translating difficult passages and the guiding star for each question of how to understand each word and phrase.
Belovedness and belonging
It’s good to be human. In fact, God says it’s “very good.” At the heart of the Bible’s story is Creator expanding our imagination for how big belonging is, who is beloved, and how far divine declarations of worthiness flow. The promise to Abraham says ALL people groups will be praised as worthy. While other translations start with condemnation and exclusion, I take that message seriously and surface it at every opportunity.
How these commitments work together
These commitments aren't separate from each other but inform each other. They're also not weighted equally. They set the boundaries for each other and guide the choices that happen as I translate within those boundaries.
What translation is and isn't
Translation is not the same thing as decoding one-to-one meanings. Even what we were taught to do in early Greek classes isn't the same as mature translation because translation isn't just about looking things up in the dictionary and filling in the blank. True translation requires understanding the culture and mindset of the original writers and audience, looking at how and when words are used and what understanding is being communicated.
Sometimes the first (or second or third) definition listed in the dictionary doesn't communicate what the writer intended. Looking at the context around the word, around the whole Bible, in other literature of the time, the historical context and cultural contexts (yes, there were multiple cultures influencing the writers at the same time) all must be seriously considered. It's about making thousands of tiny judgments about tone, imagery, ambiguity, and what a sentence is trying to communicate for the reader while staying anchored to what the Greek can honestly bear.
The overall translation philosophy for the LIT
I set out to translate with meaning-first clarity and source-text accountability. Following Nida's focus on communicating the text's function in the target language, I aim for English that lands with the kind of effect the Greek likely produced, rather than preserving churchy phrasing for its own sake. I want English-speaking readers to have, as close as possible, the same experience the original Greek-speaking audiences would likely have had. And following Pym's emphasis on translation as a series of choices with real consequences, I make my decisions transparent, manage risk through careful wording and footnotes, and resist "default" English options that import theology or stigma not required by the text.
How the philosophy guides the basic approach
Faithfulness to the text sets the boundaries for all the other commitments. Every translation decision is intended to stay inside the semantic range (the realm of possible meaning) of the Greek. It does that by paying attention to lexical definitions, patterns of word usage both inside and outside the Bible, and careful attention to how it fits into the grammar and syntax of the whole passage, as well as literary purpose, metaphor, and voice.
But faithfulness isn't the same thing as repeating inherited church-language. So avoiding religious technical language pushes against the automatic use of jargon, not because tradition is worthless, but because tradition always carries baggage with it. For instance, the word "flesh" is not an incorrect translation of sarx, but because tradition has turned it into jargon, it's not neutral. It carries doctrinal meaning that may or may not have been part of the original intention. Using fresh language lets readers be curious about the meaning in new ways.
The real-life implications
The rest of the commitments address the ethics of translation. Most translators pretend to be neutral or not to see the ethical impact of their decisions. They pretend that in attempting to be faithful to the text, they can't possibly go wrong in other ways. They're wrong because there are many ways to follow the original language that are all technically valid but lead to very different meanings in English and very different impacts on readers, churches, and theology.
Prior assumptions matter as much as "accuracy"
The Bible is a library produced by communities under empire, and it consistently critiques domination. So reading with the oppressed means the "default reader" is not the powerful, the secure, or the socially protected. It means asking, in every passage: who is vulnerable here, what is being normalized, and what kind of world does this wording quietly build? The renderings still fall within what the Greek can mean but may be quite different from what translators more comfortable with authoritarianism might choose.
Trauma-informed translation adds another layer of honesty: some passages have a long history of being weaponized. When the Greek allows more than one responsible rendering, the LIT prefers options that reduce shame and harm without altering meaning. And where the text itself is hard to swallow, the LIT aims to be transparent, using footnotes to explain interpretive choices rather than disguising them. This isn't about softening language. It's about refusing to select wording that instills shame when a non-shaming option exists. In fact, it can mean the opposite: refusing to soften the reality of harm captured in the text, like translating doulos as "enslaved person" instead of "servant."
Finally, God always looks like Jesus and belovedness and belonging are about refusing to let the act of translating drift into a cold, academic exercise that accidentally reinforces the very exclusion the Gospel confronts. When the Greek forces hard questions about God, power, wrath, judgment, or worthiness, the LIT treats Jesus as the clearest lens for what God is like and treats human dignity as non-negotiable. After all, Christ is "the image of God, who is unseen." In practice, this means choosing from among the possible options the ones that point toward the character and values clearly taught and modeled by Jesus and the themes of love and belonging for all that are the core of that message.