Following up here on what you said regarding names.
Translations are a fascinating subject because a lot of people don’t realize how much weight a translator has on his shoulders in order to do the best job to convey an idea.
@FollowerofShiloh can let us know his thoughts too since he’s Jewish but I’m going to illustrate a simple example with the Albanian language.
Let’s take the name Ermal which is a common male Albanian name.
It means “The smell of a mountain” or “wind and the mountain”
What’s the mountain smell like, you’re wondering?
Well, it smells like clear pines, the sound of the running clear water, yellow daisies in the fields and green grass.
So now how am I going to translate all of that into English?
Well, I could just be literal and call it “Ermal” but I immediately lost all that cultural meaning behind it.
But how can I translate all this cultural meaning into another culture where it might sound weird or even offensive?
So the best bet is to translate it into a more compatible Latin based or westernized name.
Because the original name might even have weird letters like Ë or Ç which would be completely off-putting to an English audience.
To make this more appealing to the audience I might think of changing the name from Ermal to Edmond or some other name which is more compatible with Latin based languages.
This is great but now the people in Albania when they see this they’d be like : “Bro are you serious, have you been drinking? What’s Edmond got to do with Ermal”?
Those guys are right from their pov but they don’t know the western pov because they’re not there.
So the translator has a lot of weight in his shoulders when doing this and the translator must know the cultures and languages of both countries well to do a good job.
But this is why I said to never get lost in text because the name of the person is ultimately not that important , what’s important is the moral teaching that’s conveyed or that an event happened or a song is being sung or tears are being wept or shame being felt or justice being dealt or a miracle being seen or a family lineage is being described or a family’s problems being told.
These are universal emotions and concepts that connect all people wherever they are despite their language.
This is why Jesus having divine wisdom uses common universal words in his parables like snakes , wolves, birds, water, wind, salt, swines etc, to convey a message and a teaching which is understood by a man in 30 AD, a man in 2500 BC, and can also be understood by a man 10,000 years from now.
Because the gift of communication is to reduce all complex ideas into words which are understood by a 5 year old and a 90 year old anywhere in the world at any time.