Bible translation and personality type

By ElShaddai Edwards | Published: September 24, 2007

Be sure to swing by Better Bibles and read about Wayne Leman’s current project, which is a hypothesis about a correlation between Bible translation style preferences and recognized personality traits, specifically the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) type indicators.

He’s provided links to an online test by MyPersonality.info – 75 multiple-choice questions, if I recall correctly. Sounds more daunting than it actually is – go with your gut reaction and you’ll score more accurately for you. I’m an INTP, an Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver, or the “Engineer” as this website puts it.

Click to view my Personality Profile page

Those scores are a little extreme as I’ve taken the MBTI tests a few times now and simply wanted to “get through the questions” to show my known type. It will be interesting to learn more about Wayne’s hypothesis, when he chooses to share it!

P.S. For a previous post I’d written on this topic, see this link.

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One Comment

  1. ElShaddai Edwards
    Posted September 26, 2007 at 4:56 AM | Permalink

    As promised, Wayne has followed up with his thoughts, though his hypothesis didn’t necessarily bear the fruit he expected. I’ll include my comments here as well:

    If I understand correctly, the I/E type is where you get your energy from; the N/S is how you gather information; the T/F is how you make decisions; and the P/J is how you act.

    I would think (I’m a T!) that the N/S type would be the most interesting one to look at in terms of what translation preferences we skew to. Are we Sensors, who want the target language of a translation to clearly communicate a range of idiomatic detail, or are we iNtuitives, who may be more able to automatically overlay a literal translation with our own idiomatic “hunches” (regardless of whether they are right or not).

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