A few blog posts have come up on my reader recently about translation, specifically the method of translation. The first link, from Accordance developer David Lang, is an excellent article on fighting “Strongnosticism.” By this he means the tendency to look up a word in a dictionary like Strong’s, find a english gloss, and insert it into the text in such a way that they find a “deeper meaning”- all while ignoring the many factors that should be taken into consideration. Some of these factors include context (ex: should logos be translated as “word” “message,” “logic,” or any of the other glosses found in its semantic range?), author’s usage (Does Paul use “worship” the same way it’s used by Matthew?), etc. His first response to this (he promises more to come) is simply “[r]ealize that Greek and Hebrew are merely languages, and think about how you use language every day.”
You can check out David’s post here: Contra “Strongnosticism”

The second link is for the better bibles blog, where Wayne Leman takes a recent ESV article that included a chart dividing translations up between whether they are “word-for-word” and whether they are based on the “best manuscripts.” Wayne’s point of contention, and mine, is over the idea of a translation being “word-for-word.” There are no translations, other than an interlinear Bible, that can be called word-for-word. Wayne uses John 3:16 as an example of why the translations in the chart cannot be considered word-for-word. Another example that I like to use is in 2 John 12, where John uses a phrase: στόμα πρὸς στόμα λαλῆσαι which literally means “mouth to mouth to speak.” No translation would render it in such a “word-for-word” fashion. Most would translate it idiomatically as “talk face to face” because the idea behind the idioms (mouth to mouth in Greek, face to face in English) match.
Wayne, who is a far better linguist and translator than I, speaks to the issue here: comparing the five leading versions.