Transliteration is taking a word from one language and re-writing it phonetically in another language. An example is the Hebrew word פֶּ֥סַח, which is transliterated to Greek as πάσχα and to English as Pesach. Transliteration carries the phonetic pronunciation from the original language into the second language, but it doesn’t translate the meaning of the word. To translate the meaning of the Hebrew פֶּ֥סַח, we render it with the word “Passover” in English.
פֶּ֥סַח is transliterated from Hebrew to English as Pesach
πάσχα is transliterated from Greek to English as Pascha
Pesach and Pascha are both translated to English as Passover
Words most commonly transliterated in the Bible include proper names (such as Jesus) and words that have no direct equivalent word in English (such as baptism).
Problems with Transliteration
The obvious issue with a transliteration is the transliterated word is not defined. A transliteration only presents the audience with a phonetic equivalence of the original-language word, so readers might be left confused and unable to correctly interpret what the word or its surrounding passage is saying.
Transliteration allows one to phonetically read the word, but one still has to seek out the definition of the word to understand it. In the absence of a clear definition of the transliterated word, one might try to figure out its meaning on his or her own (often done by context clues or falling back on learned doctrines). Attempting to figure out the meaning of a transliterated word without going back to the original language carries a high risk of failure.
Example 1: βάπτισμα (Baptisma)
People frequently dispute whether baptism ought to be done by immersion in water or sprinkling with water. I had a student in class once raise a point that he doesn’t see anywhere in the Bible where we are clearly told baptism is done by immersion. This is a great example of how scriptural meaning is lost in transliteration. To clear up the student’s misunderstanding, we must look at the definition of baptisma and understand that baptisma’s meaning encompasses immersion or submersion. The student was seeing “immersion” every time he read “baptism” in his English version of the Bible, but he just didn’t know it. When faced with difficulty understanding the concept of baptism, if the student had consulted a Greek lexicon to clarify its meaning he could have found the answer he was looking for.