The Slovak "King James Version"

This is the Rohácek translation of the Bible into Slovak. It was originally published in 1936. I happen to understand Slovak, but the first time I opened and read this version, I assumed somebody had made a mistake and labeled the work quite wrongly. It didn't sound anywhere close to the Slovak I knew. The reason, of course, is that Jozef Rohácek began his translation work over a century ago, and hence wrote in a Slovak virtually everyone today would consider archaic. Maybe it's just me, but I sometimes think it sounds “Czech”, as well. Or Western Slovak? I also suspect that it might be deliberately archaizing and “sacralizing” – somehow, I doubt the ordinary Slovak Joe in Austria-Hungary or the First Czechoslovak Republic talked quite like this!

Apparently, Rohácek's version is extremely difficult to understand for other reasons, too. It's very “literal”, attempting to follow the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek text as closely as possible, even to the point of sacrificing readability. When faced with terms that were untranslatable, Rohácek took the liberty of creating entirely new Slovak words. So apparently, we're dealing with a highly competent scholarly translation, but one filled with both archaisms and neologism. Maybe it's just me, but the Old Testament is extremely hard to decipher, while the New Testament has more “flow”.

Rohácek was a Lutheran, but it seems the Lutheran Church in Slovakia never adopted his translation, but clearly somebody somewhere is still distributing it. Whoever gave me a copy, probably got it from evangelicals or Pentecostals. It's also freely available on the web, including on sites which also offer modern Slovak translations.

I suppose you could say that this demanding translation gives an entirely new meaning to the expression “diligently search the Scriptures”!