scholarly journals Offers of Opportunity: Function-Added Bible Translation and Language Promotion

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Andrew Maust

Bible translation presents local-language communities not only with “offers of information” but opportunities to promote the target language through adoption of advances in the fields of translation studies, exegesis, and biblical studies. Drawing on skopos theory, this paper encourages communities to include within their translation brief the explicit goal of taking advantage of such opportunities to the end that translators are freed up to transcend the exegetical and translational choices imposed by a language of wider communication. In so doing, the local language will add additional functions as well as intrinsic and extrinsic value to the target text. Finally, potential objections to such an approach are forestalled by addressing sociolinguistic factors with which translating communities will have to come to terms.

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aloo O. Mojola

This article focuses on issues of gender in Bible translation and looks at how the dominant patriarchal framework that underlies biblical cultures, including both traditional and contemporary cultures, influences biblical interpretation and ensuing Bible translations in diverse languages. This framework undermines gender-neutral or gender-sensitive interpretations and translations of the biblical text in favour of the dominant patriarchal tradition. Belief in biblical inerrancy and infallibility tends to buttress and lend solid unwavering support to the patriarchal standpoint in spite of the diversity and variety of numerous contested, differing and even opposing interpretations on many key biblical teachings. The article seeks to challenge the role of patriarchalism in biblical interpretation and translation drawing on insights from gender studies, translation studies, biblical studies and cultural studies. It seeks to interrogate the ways in which the Bible is used to defend patriarchalism and to propose a gender-sensitive approach rooted in the principles of justice, fairness and the equality of both male and female as created in the divine image.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article brings to question basic assumptions on issues of gender in the following disciplines – Biblical studies, translation studies and social-cultural studies – and propose a rethinking of these assumptions and if possible their abandonment and replacement by those that promote egalitarianism and justice across the sexes.


Open Theology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Nord

AbstractBible translation is traditionally in the hands of theologians, whose focus is on the meaning of the source text rather than on what modern readers are able to understand. This paper attempts to show where translation theory, or more specifically, the Skopos theory of translation, may help Bible translators to produce texts that “work” or “function” for the intended audience without betraying their trust that they are reading God’s word in their own language. After a brief overview of the development of Translation Studies, we shall take a quick look at some guiding principles of Bible translation, as explained in prefaces of modern versions, before presenting the main ideas of Skopos theory and illustrating them by a few examples from the New Testament. The conclusion will sum up the fundamental hypotheses of the skopos-theoretical concept “Function + Loyalty.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong King Lee

Abstract Translation has traditionally been viewed as a branch of applied linguistics. This has changed drastically in recent decades, which have witnessed translation studies growing as a field beyond, and sometimes against, applied linguistics. This paper is an attempt to think translation back into applied linguistics by reconceptualizing translation through the notions of distributed language, semiotic repertoire, and assemblage. It argues that: (a) embedded within a larger textual-media ecology, translation is enacted through dialogical interaction among the persons, texts, technologies, platforms, institutions, and traditions operating within that ecology; (b) what we call translations are second-order constructs, or relatively stable formations of signs abstracted from the processual flux of translating on the first-order; (c) translation is not just about moving a work from one discrete language system across to another, but about distributing it through semiotic repertoires; (d) by orchestrating resources performatively, translations are not just interventions in the target language and culture, but are transformative of the entire translingual and multimodal space (discursive, interpretive, material) surrounding a work. The paper argues that distributed thinking helps us de-fetishize translation as an object of study and reimagine translators as partaking of a creative network of production alongside other human and non-human agents.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Xue Chen ◽  
Xinyu Bu

Movie name, as an indispensable component of the movie as a whole, is used to transmit the ideas of the movies, please audiences with aesthetic value, and enhance the interests of watchers to watch it. Skopos theory highlights the importance of both the translator and the culture and it makes the translator find a suitable mode to translate the names of movies. Movie name translation has become a important part of translation studies. Skopos theory can lead the translator to do a rendering of movie names while he/she knows the objectives of translation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
Nina GOLOB

Yet another year has come to its end. It brought us some new ideas and we have spent several months in preparations to realize them.The greatest change is that we may be expecting the new ALA issue within a month, in January 2018 already. From the year to come, we will still be publishing two issues per year, with the winter issue published in January coming first. The second issue will be the summer issue, published in July. At this opportunity we would like to express our gratitude to all the authors in the ALA journal, and alongside send out our call for new articles. All the rest of the changes might only be noticed by our regular readers, while newcomers will hopefully find our e-journal competent, functional, and user friendly. This number of the ALA journal is mostly dedicated to the area of translation studies, however, also contains three interesting works on language. Wing Bo Anna TSO in her work “Repressed Sexual Modernity: A Case Study of Herbert Giles’ (1845 - 1935) Rendition of Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880) in the Late Qing” attempts the literary-cultural approach and investigates the lost in translation. She focused on examining gender ideologies in the original and translated work to find out that transgressive gender views get strongly repressed in Giles’ English rendition.A similar thought, namely the importance of the cultural background of the text in translation is stressed in the article “Metaphor in Translation: Cognitive Perspectives on Omar Khayyam’s Poetry as Rendered into English and Kurdish”, written by Rahman VEISI HASAR and Ehsan PANAHBAR. As metaphors as cognitive phenomena can not be relegated to linguistic expression only, the research findings reveal that translators have mostly been successful in translating metaphors dependent on shared cultural models, however, have failed to recreate metaphors dependent on non-shared cultural models.Difficulties in translating metaphors were also experienced by Eva VUČKOVIČ and Byoung Yoong KANG, who in their article “Prevajanje Ko Unove poezije iz korejščine v slovenščino” address several major problems they have encountered when translating poetry from Korean into Slovene. The aricle is written in Slovene and is a pionieering work on translation studies from Korean into Slovene.Lija GANTAR wrote an article “Ancient Greek Legend in Modern Japanese Literature: ‘Run, Melos!’ by Dazai Osamu” in which she discusses how the Japanese author managed to retell a Western literature story in a way to succesfully make it a part of the Japanese literature. The following three articles refer to language. Sweta SINHA in her article “Fuzzy Logic Based Teaching/Learning of a Foreign Language in Multilingual Situations” managed to incorporate the concept of Fuzzy Logic (FL), which primarily gained momentum in the areas of artificial intelligence and allied researches, into a foreign language classroom. She describes language pedagogy as more real-like when observed through the lens of fuzzy logic and fuzzy thinking, and claims that in that way language interference is more of a resource than a challenge.Now already a sequential work on adjective distribution was contributed by LI Wenchao, who wrote the article “Revisit Adjective Distribution in Chinese”. In it the author re-classifies Chinese monosyllabic adjectives and verbs in light of ‘scale structure’ and examines how various adjectives are associated with different scalar layers of verbs.  Finally, an interesting project report on the development of  early Persian vocabulary in the process of first language acquisition was written by Hajar SHAHHOSEINI. The report is entitled “Investigation of Early Vocabulary Development of a Persian Speaking Child at Age 2 Years Old in Iran”.Editors and Editorial Board thank all the contributors to this volume, and wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
Yingqin Liu

This study explores the effects of teaching EFL students to use an outline in their English essays. The researchers maintain that using outlines can raise students’ awareness of different audience expectations embedded in the rhetoric of the target language (English) and culture and can improve their English academic writing. The study was based on a four-week long case study at a university in Xi’an, China, in which 24 Chinese EFL students at the College of Translation Studies participated. A discourse analysis was conducted by comparing the Chinese EFL students’ English essays produced at the beginning of the study with those produced at the end of the study after learning and practicing outlining for writing the English essays. Email inquiries were used for understanding the participants’ viewpoints on learning how to write English essay outlines. The findings reveal that teaching EFL students to use outlining in their English essays is an effective way to help them improve their essay writing. Not only can it enhance the students’ understanding about using the English thesis statements, but it can also help improve the use of related, logical, and specific detailed examples to support the main ideas in their essays. The email inquiries also revealed that the students believe that outline learning helped them to understand the differences between Chinese and English essay writing. The implications of the study for intercultural rhetoric are also discussed.


Literator ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mthikazi Rose Masubelele

The meaning of words comes into play when words as units of translation are to be translated from one language into another. Lexical items that are extant in one language but not in others pose enormous problems for translators. The translation of ideophones – which feature very prominently in African discourse – is a case in point in this article. Translators faced with the translation of such forms are required to come up with strategies to aptly express their meanings in the target text. This article seeks to establish how CSZ Ntuli, in his English translation of an isiZulu short story Uthingo Lwenkosazana by DBZ Ntuli, has translated some of the ideophones used by the original author. Translation strategies used by CSZ Ntuli in his translation to express the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones will be brought to light in this article. It will be confirmed that CSZ Ntuli, using different lexical forms in the target language, has effectively changed unfamiliar isiZulu cultural notions to concepts that the English target reader can relate to. It will also be shown that the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones can be expressed in the target language using approximation and amplification as translation strategies provided that the translator has a good command of both source and target languages. The discussion will also look at how various translation scholars view the notion of equivalence at word level, and research on ideophones in isiZulu will also be reviewed.


Author(s):  
G. Mehmet ◽  
◽  
А.E. Alpysbayeva ◽  

The article is the first to consider the translation of proper names used in M. Zhumabaev's poem Turkestan from Kazakh into English from the point of view of the principles of forenization and domestication. This famous work of the poet, which describes the whole essence of the Turkic peoples, is saturated with historical and culturally distinct anthroponyms and toponyms. The analytical part examines the question of how this information was reflected in the target language, how much the calorie was adopted or preserved. In general, the translation of proper names from Kazakh into English is one of the branches of domestic translation studies that needs scientific substantiation and research development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Nasimah Abdullah

While the interpretation of the Quran emphasizes the importance of an understanding of the causes, issues and incidents in relation to revelation as well as knowing its time and place, the translation studies concern with the roles of context in ensuring a precise translation. Context is regarded as one of the crucial parts in translating metaphorical connotations as it captures the meaning that transcends its literal translation. This study aims to highlight the importance of context in achieving an exact translation, especially in translating the Quranic metaphorical connotationsinto the Malay language based on semantic equivalence between the source and target text to the closest possible to the meaning of the original Arabic text. This is achieved by an analysis of the descriptive, analytical and comparative methods of selected copies of translations by Mahmoud Younis, Abdullah Basmeih and Zaini Dahalan. The findings show that these translators pay special attention to the importance of context in the translation of the Quranic metaphorical connotations. Evidences also show some flaws in the delivery of the intended meaning in the target language when these translations rely solely on the texts’ literal translation, consequently causing a diversion from the intended meaning of the Quranic message. Therefore, this study suggests that it is not reliable for a study of the Quran nor for the reader of the target language to depend on one absolute translation only, but to refer to and compare different copies of the translation in order to reach the precise connotation. إذا كانت التفاسير القرآنية تهتم بمعرفة أسباب النزول للآيات القرآنية والقضايا والحوادث المتعلقة بها وكذلك وقت ومكان نزول الآية القرآنية بغية الوصول إلى معرفة تفسيرها وفهمها فهما صحيحا، فإن دراسات الترجمة تعتني بدور السياق ) context ( في تحقيق الترجمة الححيحة يع د السياق اانبا م اجووان الي جب ااننتبا إليها نند ترجمة الدانانت المجازية نظرا انشتمالها نلى المعنى الذي يتجاوز المعنى الحقيقي، والذي ان يمك نقله نقلا حرفيا، وإان لفسد المعنى المراد يستهدف هذا البحث إلى إبراز أهمية السياق في تحقيق ال ترجمة الححيحة، نظرا لأهمية مراناته، خاصة في ترجمة الدانانت المجازية القرآنية إلى اللغة الملايوية بوصفها محاولة التقري بالمعنى، ان تبديل له، المبنية نلى نلاقة التكافؤ الدانلي بين النص المحدر، وهو النص القرآني العربي، والنص الهدف، وهو النص المترام إلى اللغة الملايوية ويتم هذا البحث باختيار النسخ الي ترجمها محمود يونس، والشيخ نبد الله بسَميه، والحاج زيني دحلان للقيام بالدراسة التحليلية النموذاية تتم معاجوة الموضوع في هذا البحث بالمنهج الوصفي والمنهج التحليلي والمنهج المقارن فم خلال تحليل بعض النماذج، تلاحظ الباحثة أن المترجمين يرانون السياق في ترجمتهم الدانانت المجازية القرآنية، لكنه ان يخلو م بعض القحور الي تحتاج إلى إنادة النظر فيها؛ منها أن بعض النحوص القرآنية ترجموها ترجمة حرفية مما أدى إلى ضياع المعنى المراد في الرسالة القرآنية لذلك توصي الدراسة بضرورة المقارنة بين التراام المختلفة لأال الوصول إلى المعنى المقحود في الرسالة القرآنية، وان يعتمد القارئ نلى ترجمة واحدة مجردة


Author(s):  
Jacobus Naude

A live webinar on translation studies and its implications for Bible translation was held on 20 August 2020. The goal was to answer the question: What insights can Bible translation practitioners glean from the field of translation studies? It is argued that the contribution of translation studies to Bible translation cannot be ignored; instead, translation studies is indispensable for Bible translation, especially in the planning, the establishment and the execution of a Bible translation project. After the introduction, the webinar focused on the nature of translation studies followed by the dissemination of translation knowledge for Bible translation. The conclusion listed the shifts that need to take place in Bible translation on the basis of its engagement with translation studies.


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