Revision Principles & Process
The Reason for Revising CUV
Changes in language as time goes by have resulted in the revision of English Bibles at 30-year intervals. Likewise, the Chinese language had experienced lots of changes in the last century, and many terms in the Chinese Union Version (CUV) have become rare or ambiguous in meaning. In addition, in recent years, the discovery of old manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and research such as the Septuagint have provided new directions and methodologies in translation of the Biblical verses. Revision of the CUV is therefore necessary.
In 1983, the United Bible Societies reached agreement with leaders of Chinese churches to revise the CUV. With strong support of Three-Self Patriotic Movement/China Christian Council (TSPM/CCC), scholars, translation consultants and editorial experts teamed up to commence this great project. In 2000, the Hong Kong Bible Society took on this mission and published the Revised Chinese Union Version (RCUV) in 2010.
Principles of Revision
To be faithful to the original style of the poetic and popular CUV and facilitate the understanding among young believers and non-Christians, the RCUV has been revised according to principles agreed by leaders of Chinese churches around the world:
Draw readers to the essence of original text, while with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, God’s words can also be fully understood by them today. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and other ancient manuscripts in the few past decades has inspired advancement in tackling the problem of use of different words in the scriptures as well as in understanding and interpretation of the biblical scriptures in the Biblical academia. This precious information was not available to CUV translators 100 years ago. The RCUV provides footnotes to the original writings based on these new scriptural sources when the original text is obscure in meaning or has different meanings.
The revision of the RCUV deployed two core references, the Greek New Testament (4th edition, 1993) as the basis for the New Testament, and the Hebrew version of Masoretic Text (which is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 5th edition, 1997, published under consignment by the United Bible Societies to the German Bible Society) for the Old Testament.
a. Committed to showing the unique linguistic features of the original text, e.g, distinction between singular/plural form, passive/active state, names/titles of people, nouns/verbs
b. Direct translation of terms without affecting the sense of Chinese language
c. To strive for reflecting sentence construction, structure and word order of original text
d. Footnotes are provided to original texts that carry obscure meanings, various interpretations or meanings of ancient manuscripts.
e. Occasionally, the Septuagint is recognized as more historic and used in the main text.
f. In very few cases, the Dead Sea Scroll is recognized as more historic and used in the main text.
enhance understanding by new believers and non-believers.
a. Modify or remove areas that have wrong meanings, or that may cause misinterpretation, ambiguity and obscurity
b. Modify terms of ancient roots, words rare in meaning, strange words, difficult words, vernacular words, etc.
c. Succinct and practical with supplementary information
- Inserted coloured standard geographical maps, with coordinates and indexes of places for easy reference
- Including “compiled list of names of people” and “compiled list of names of places” in the CUV, and having revised inconsistent translations of names of people/places in the CUV
- Including lists of measurements of length, weight, solid/liquid materials, capacity and monetary values used in Old and New Testaments. Also provided are reference lists of modern measurements based on Metric Units, Imperial Units and Chinese Units.
- The List of Vocabularies, Terms and Phrases has been amended and expanded to 242 items in total.
- There are 307 footnotes in the New Testament of CUV. The RCUV has included new entries of footnotes to 496, an increase of 60%. The Old Testament has 2014 footnotes, almost threefold of the number in the CUV.
