Bible Translation

Frames of Reference

Timothy Wilt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317640592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a broad-based, contemporary perspective on Bible translation in terms of academic areas foundational to the endeavor: translation studies, communication theory, linguistics, cultural studies, biblical studies and literary and rhetorical studies. The discussion of each area is geared towards non-specialists, to introduce them to notions, trends and tools that can contribute to their understanding of translation.

The Bible translator is encouraged to appreciate various approaches to translation in view of the wide variety of communicative, organizational and sociocultural situations in which translation occurs. However, literary representation of the Scriptures receives special attention since it has been neglected in earlier, influential works on Bible translation.

In addition to useful introductory and concluding sections, the book consists of six chapters: Scripture Translation in the Era of Translation Studies; Translation and Communication; The Role of Culture in Communication; Advances in Linguistic Theory and their Relavance to Translation; Biblical Studies and Bible Translation; and A Lterary Approach to Biblical Text Analysis and Translation.

The authors are translation consultants for the United Bible Societies. They have worked with translation projects in various media and in languages ranging from ones of a few hundred speakers to international ones, in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

1.
Scripture Translation in the Era of Translation studies

ALOO OSOTSI MOJOLA AND ERNST WENDLAND

The present era of translation is an era characterized by a wide variety of descriptive and explanatory studies of translation processes and products and, accordingly, by a wide variety of approaches to translation. This era contrasts considerably with the preceding one in which Eugene Nida played such a key role in promoting a particular approach to translation. In the first part of this chapter, we briefly indicate some of Nida’s insights concerning translation and problematic aspects of his presentation in one work of great influence on Bible translators. We then indicate the broad scope of contemporary studies in translation, and look at some of the discussions concerning the translation of literary texts, an area receiving relatively little attention in the era of dynamic equivalence, but of increasing interest to Bible translators.

1.1 The dynamic equivalent approach to translation and its institutionalization

Nida’s (1964) Toward a Science of Translating has been described as being, in its time, the “‘Bible’ not just for Bible translation but for translation theory in general” (Gentzler 1993:44). Five years later, he co-authored with Taber (1969) The Theory and Practice of Translation (TAPOT). This “logical outgrowth of the previous book” (1969:vii) would in turn become the key reference point for Bible translators. His later works would be viewed by many, including Nida himself (de Waard and Nida 1986:vii-vii), as basically confirming TAPOT’s translation approach and communication model. It is on this work that we concentrate because of its continuing influence on many involved in Bible translation and because of the prominence given to it in discussions of Bible translation.

In their introductory chapter ‘A new concept of translating’, Nida and Taber (1969:3-9) identified ‘new attitudes’ concerning the receptor and source languages of Bible translations:

• Each language has its own genius.
• To communicate effectively one must respect the genius of each language.
• Anything that can be said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is an essential element of the message.
• To preserve the content of the message the form must be changed.
• The languages of the Bible are subject to the same limitations as any other natural language.
• The writers of the biblical books expected to be understood.
• The translator must attempt to reproduce the meaning of a passage as understood by the writer.

These ‘new attitudes’ would, Nida and Taber assumed, lead to working towards a translation ‘dynamically equivalent’ to the original:

a translation in which the message of the original text has been transported into the receptor language in such a way that the RESPONSE of the RECEPTOR is essentially that of the original receptors. Frequently, the form of the original text is changed; but as long as the change follows the rules of back transformation in the source language, of contextual consistency in the transfer, and of transformation in the receptor language, the message is preserved and the translation is faithful. (ibid:200; their emphasis)

This was opposed to a formally correspondent translation in which:

the features of the form of the source text have been mechanically reproduced in the receptor language. Typically, formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labour unduly hard. (ibid:201)

They depicted the process of producing a dynamically equivalent translation as involving three stages:

• 1) analysis, in which the surface structure (i.e., the message as given in language A) is analysed in terms of (a) the grammatical relationships and (b) the meanings of the words and combinations of words,
• 2) transfer, in which the analysed material is transferred in the mind of the translator from language A to language B, and
• 3) restructuring, in which the transferred material is restructured in order to make the final message fully acceptable in the receptor language. (ibid:33, our italics)

The analysis stage, they said, was composed of three major steps:

• 1) determining the meaningful relationships between words and combinations of words,
• 2) [determining] the referential meaning of the words and special combinations of words (the idioms), and
• 3) [determining] the connotative meaning, i.e. how the users of the language react, whether positively or negatively, to the words and combinations of them. (ibid:34)

TAPOT was considered to provide the theory behind popular translations of the New Testament into Spanish and English published in the 1960’s. The Versión Popular and Today’s English Version would be followed by the French New Testament en français courant and the German Die Gute Nachricht. These publications, eventually including the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Apocryphal books, became increasingly viewed by many not only as incarnations of the theory of dynamic equivalence translation as expounded in TAPOT but as models for imitation everywhere. Fundamental support for this approach was provided through those whose scholarly contributions in their primary fields of research enhanced the academic respect for their work on translation and whose communicational skills facilitated practical application: anthropologists and linguists such as Wonderly, Smalley, Reyburn and Loewen; biblical scholars such as Bratcher, Margot, Newman and de Waard.

The validity of the dynamic-equivalence approach was generally assumed or supported in the publications of the United Bible Societies (UBS) produced during that time period: The Bible Translator, a journal founded in 1949 to provide a forum for discussing Bible translation theory and practice; a series of monographs on Bible translation; and the Handbook series, which attempted to guide translators’ application of the dynamic-equivalence approach to the wide range of problems encountered in translating the Bible into languages throughout the world.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), with which Nida had worked before becoming translation secretary for the American Bible Society, would develop its own literature on translation highly similar in perspective to TAPOT but more developed at the pedagogical level: for example, Beekman and Callow (1974), Barnwell (1975) and Larson (1984). For both SIL and UBS, a missiological agenda was crucially linked to their translation approach, although there was also a keen concern that church people be able to understand biblical texts clearly:

The Scriptures must be intelligible to non-Christians, and if they are, they will also be intelligible to Christians. Not only is this principle important in making the translation of the Bible effective as an instrument of evangelism, but it is also necessary if the language of the church is to be kept from becoming an esoteric dialect … (Nida and Taber 1969:31-32)

[Translating the Word of God] has been written out of the conviction that an accurate and intelligible version of the Scriptures is essential both to the evangelisation of the lost, and to the building up of strong communities of believers. (Beekman and Callow 1974:13)

1.2 Evaluation of the TAPOT approach to translation

TAPOT was written with the goal behind all of Nida’s work: “the effective communication of the Good News about Jesus Christ across all kinds of cultural and linguistic barriers” (North 1974:xi). Robinson (1991) calls Nida’s work towards this goal ‘subversive’, in the sense that he set out to dethrone the popularity of Bible versions which made little sense to the ordinary person:

One of the best-publicized recent subversions of the KJV/RSV hegemony was Today’s English Version in the mid-sixties – best publicized because one of its prime movers was the prolific and persuasive Eugene Nida … the foremost theorist of sense-for-sense and response-for-response Bible translation in our day. It may seem strange to call ‘subversive’ a man who upholds the Bible translation principles of Jerome and Luther – but in fact he is as subversive as Jerome and Luther, who similarly burst upon a scene dominated by rigidly fixed expectations and smashed them. (ibid:225)

Robinson notes that these fixed expectations and the conviction of some that there is one and only one correct Bible translation or version which “they read, or were read to out of, in their childhood” (ibid) tend to become a “nostalgic locus of emotional stability and security”. Thus, according to Robinson, part of Nida’s subversion was waking up tranquillised audiences:

Obviously if the translator wants to reach his or her … reader, to be the instrument not of anaesthesia but of conversion, a vehicle not of spiritual death but of awakening, rebirth, new life, there has to be something striking in the translation, something to catch the reader’s attention – which is to say, something subversive. To convert, one must subvert. This is obviously true if one is speaking to nonbelievers; but it is also true if one is speaking to believers who are staid in their ways. Wake up, you Pharisees! (ibid:226)

Robinson concludes by correctly noting that Nida “directs the Bible Society’s subversion … at the average Bible reader, the ordinary reader, the fourth-grade reader for whom newspapers are written” (ibid). His subversive act consisted in opening the word to new audiences, as well as to some in the old and familiar audience, in empowering new groups to have direct access to the Scriptures without mediation from the religious elite, the clergy, theologians or the biblical scholar.

Ironically, in the course of time fixed expectations and convictions were built up around the so-called common language translations. These new translations exemplified by the TEV created a new orthodoxy and standard, to be imitated and reproduced everywhere. This was however counter to the subversive spirit set in motion by the Nida revolution, if we can call it that.

An obvious limitation of the TAPOT presentation, reflective of the era in which it was produced, is its focus on sentence-level-and-below linguistics. Nida and Taber of course recognized this limitation and indicated the importance of the study of ‘discourse structure’ (1969:152ff), an area in which Grimes (for example, 1975) and Longacre (for example, 1983) would do ground-breaking studies, greatly influencing Bible translators and researchers. Chapters 4 and 6 in our book indicate other aspects of above-the-sentence concerns that would receive increasing attention in various academic fields and in a variety of related publications on Bible translation, in the years following the publication of TAPOT.

But it was not just the scope of linguistics at the time that was problematic: even more so was the focus on the discipline of linguistics itself, which seemed to identify translation with – limit it to – the following of linguistic procedures. As pointed out by Holmes, among others, this was fairly typical of writings on translation in that era. Many contemporary translation theorists would agree with Holmes’ assessment that this was “in large part simplistic and naïve, at least when applied to highly complex entities of the kind that ‘literary texts’ tend to be” (1994:81), and that the focus “turned out to be a dead end” (ibid:94). Again, an overview of Nida’s work indicates that he was certainly not locked into a ‘linguistic approach’ to translation. His focus on linguistics in TAPOT was complemented by many other writings espousing a multi-disciplinary approach to translation, a perspective fully embraced and vigorously defended and promoted within the emerging field of translation studies, discussed in the following section.

Another limitation of TAPOT was its portrayal of translation in terms of the dichotomy of formal correspondence versus dynamic equivalence. This was in the tradition of what Robinson (1997:1) refers to as “the ancient division between ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense-for-sense’ translation”; the approach advocated by Nida was in the tradition of Cicero, Horace, Augustine, Jerome and Luther, among many others. But this division “has grown enormously complicated”:

Nowadays it covers radically different ground as Juliane House’s … distinctions between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ translation, between drawing attention to the fact that a given text is a translation and pretending that it was originally written in the target language; and Lawrence Venuti’s … distinction, drawn from the German Romantics, between ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ translation … Linguistic and literary approaches to translation have likewise grown complex, as linguists and literary critics both become interested in social power and belief systems … as linguists become psycholinguists, studying translation processes through ‘think-aloud protocols’, and literary critics become hermeneuticists, studying translation processes through the complex philosophical theories of, say, Walter Benjamin … Martin Heidegger … or Jacques Derrida … (ibid)

Other distinctions could be noted, such as: literal/idiomatic (Beekman and Callow 1974), semantic/communicative (Newmark 1981), form-based/meaning-based (as in Larson 1984), documentary/instrumental (Nord 1997), direct/indirect (Gutt 2000), observational/participative (Pym 1992), archaizing/modernizing, and linguistic/literary. Such distinctions suggest that various Bible translation situations can be analysed in a wide variety of ways and be considerably more complex than the formal-dynamic dichotomy might suggest.

The TAPOT approach to translation was based upon a communication model developed in Nida’s Message and Mission (1960), a sophisticated discussion of the complexities of cross-cultural communication. The model assumed, or at least could be understood to assume, what Reddy (1979:209) identified as the fallacy of the conduit metaphor:

• 1) Language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another;
• 2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the words;
• 3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others, and
• 4) in listening and reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Scripture Translation in the Era of Translation Studies
• 2. Translation and Communication
• 3. The role of Culture in Translation
• 4. Advances in Linguistic Theory and their Relevance to Translation
• 5. Biblical studies and Bible translation
• 6. A Literary Approach to Biblical Text Analysis and Translation
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendices
• References
• Index