What do we do about translations of the Scriptures?

This interview (and book review) got me to thinking. We know from critical analysis that what has come down to us through time is not only a translation of a religious text, but a translation of a religious text that has not gone unchanged over the generations. There are passages throughout the old an new testaments that we can now be reasonably confident were not penned by the original authors in their original documents (even if the original authors are in doubt and the original documents not extant). Sometimes these changes are small, a word here or there, sometimes much larger, whole passages added to a book. As most English translations of Scripture are produced for “consumption” by a traditional oriented church, these changes remain by and large in place, usually with some kind of foot note to indicate their questionable status. But this does not prevent them from being used in the construction of theology or in sermons, Bible studies, and attempts to spread the gospel. Is this not problematic?

Now we see an even more subtle issue at work. Not only are the original texts something we need to re-contextualize as we attempt to derive meaning from them for our own lives, but we must contextualize the translation choices as well as the interpretation choices. If King David had no sense of a “soul”, then it makes no sense to translate Psalms to talk about the soul, even if the word being translated has come to have that meaning in more recent times. The KJV has Psalm 69 like this:

1Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

More recent translations have opted for “neck” instead of “soul” and suddenly the passage becomes far less cryptic. And what of the first passage in Ruth chapter three? The ESV has this:

1Then Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek rest for you, that it may be well with you? 2Is not Boaz our relative, with whose young women you were? See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. 3 Wash therefore and anoint yourself, and put on your cloak and go down to the threshing floor, but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. 4But when he lies down, observe the place where he lies. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down, and he will tell you what to do.” 5And she replied, “All that you say I will do.”

It was brought to my attention while at college that “uncover his feet” is most likely a deliberate mistranslation made to protect the prurience of Christians, and that the passage is more likely to be intended to say “uncover his stones”. The implication there being rather more obvious than why she would uncover his feet, which is confusing at best.

Is there any kind of movement/effort/discussion going on about constructing a translation of the Scriptures based on only what are considered to be the most reliably authentic versions of the original Greek and with an effort to produce a translation that does its best to remove these culturally motivated translations? Is such a version necessary or beneficial?

An even bigger can of worms is the notion that not only are the texts themselves written from within a specific framework that we must come to understand before attempting to glean a meaning, but the very process of determining which books were and were not included in our canon was also part of a cultural, political and theological framework which we must also understand. Why are Paul’s letters (which to some seem at times to be at odds with the gospels) included, and why were only four gospels, two of which were based on one of the others, included? What role can apocryphal and extra-canonical books play in our formation of theology?