Chet at its root means missing the mark, like an archer who misses. Aveira means passing over a line. Teshuva means return. But every English siddur and Chumash says sin and repentance, and the whole flavor is different, fear and guilt instead of missing and coming back.
1. Where does the English word sin actually come from, and when did Jewish translations start using it for chet?
2. Did we borrow the whole framing from Christianity, original sin, guilt, fear of punishment, and does the Hebrew really carry a different attitude?
3. Does the word choice change how a person relates to the avodah? If I grow up thinking in sin and repentance instead of missing and returning, am I practicing a different Judaism than the one the Torah describes?
Yes, I think translation has affected the way many Jews understand these concepts. The English word “sin” is an ancient Germanic word …. Old English synn …. and long before Jews were translating Torah into English it already carried centuries of Christian religious associations: guilt, offense against God, damnation, and so forth. Jewish English translations naturally inherited much of the vocabulary of the English Bible tradition; even the 1917 JPS translation relied heavily on earlier Christian English translations. But חטא does not have precisely the same flavor. The root can literally mean to miss …. as in the archers who could sling a stone at a hair ולא יחטא, “and not miss” (Shoftim 20:16) …. and from there it also means going wrong or missing the proper path. עבירה is crossing over a boundary, and תשובה is literally returning. Those words produce a very different picture: you missed, you went off the road, you crossed a line …. now come back.
That does not mean Judaism has no concepts of wrongdoing, responsibility, regret, punishment, angels, Gehinnom, and so forth; those are certainly present in Jewish sources. But the imagery and emotional baggage with which we describe them has often been colored by whichever surrounding civilization Jews lived among …. Christians in Europe and sometimes Islamic elsewhere. That is one reason I am very cautious with translations. If you turn chet automatically into “sin” and teshuvah into “repentance,” a child can easily absorb a theology of guilt and fear that is not necessarily what the Hebrew is saying. Teshuvah is not primarily sitting around feeling terrible about yourself. You went the wrong way; turn around and come back. That change in language can make a tremendous difference in how a person understands the entire avodah.