scholarly journals Textwahrheit und Übersetzen. Beobachtungen an neueren Bibelübersetzungen

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Radegundis Stolze
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Original Message ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Interpretation

Recently many new German bible translations have appeared. The article first presents a comparison of paragraphs from ten different translations, with examples taken from the New Testament. This shows some basic trends. On the one hand, the objective of bible translation is Christian education, edification and worship usage. On the other hand, some translations focus on the cultural information, easy readability and inclusive language. Such orientation accepts purposeful adaptation and thus modifies the original text. And there are a few translations that constitute the product of an individual interpretation of the text, and its presentation in a literary form. The discussion of these translation trends is complemented by a critique of the prominent focus on the language rather than on the message, and the question of a text's truth and a translator's linguistic awareness is raised. The traditional translation criticism distinguishing between literal and target-oriented translation, and even cultural adaptation, is integrated here by a discussion of the procedural, functional, objectivistic and ethical implications of the new bible translations. One feature of all recent projects of bible translation seems to be a pedagogical concern. Authors think that they need to guide readers in their interpretation, because those may be unable to understand the very old, strange and often opaque text; or they might misunderstand it and thus miss the true message; or they should learn something about the historic culture; and last but not least, traditional patriarchal attitudes promoted by Christianity should be overcome with a new text. The idea is that people's thinking can be directed by language. Thus the question is raised, whether a translation should also be an interpretation. In a critical view of the interpretive translation, this article presents the hermeneutic approach to translation. This implies a well-informed openness as an attitude towards the original message, rather than a method. The focus is neither on language structure nor on the addressees, but on the text's message. This includes the problem of understanding a written text, what is never a matter of fact. The text's theological exegesis is a prerequisite for the translation, but the value of that translation is not only based on that. Translation aims at a faithful representation of the message and opens the direction of a text, but the individual interpretation is always done by the readers themselves. When the translator as a reader identifies himself with the message, s/he will cognitively produce formulations apt to give resonance to this message. The translator becomes a co-author of that text, and just as for the original author, one will never totally govern the readers' understanding. The translator's voice will be more convincing, when only one person is responsible for the text production, different from the team works in various official projects of bible translation. Even if the bible as such is a composition of many different books and pieces of texts, these manifold voices may be better noted by one translator alone, rather than by many contributors, each of whom as a specialist only translates one book. Finally, the stylistic shape of the target text is decisive. The bible translator should have an excellent knowledge of the target language, in order to present various nuances. Translating is not an information about an original text, it represents that original message in another language.

scholarly journals History and theory of Scripture translations

2008 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Claude Loba-Mkole
Keyword(s):  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Functional Equivalence ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History And Theory

This article argues for the importance of Bible translations through its historical achievements and theoretical frames of reference. The missionary expansion of Christianity owes its very being to translations. The early Christian communities knew the Bible through the LXX translations while churches today still continue to use various translations. Translations shape Scripture interpretations, especially when a given interpretation depends on a particular translation. A particular interpretation can also influence a given translation. The article shows how translation theories have been developed to clarify and how the transaction source-target is culturally handled. The articles discuss some of these “theoretical frames”, namely the functional equivalence, relevance, literary functional equivalence and intercultural mediation. By means of a historical overview and a reflection on Bible translation theories the article aims to focus on the role of Africa in translation history.

Digitization of Bibles in Greater China (1661–1960)

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-254
Author(s):  
Simon Wong
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Chinese Han ◽  
Greater China ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Eastern Christianity ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Language Groups

Bible translations in (or for) Greater China may be classified into three categories: Chinese, Han dialects, and indigenous languages. All these language groups witness translation activities by Protestant missionaries. However, in its earliest history, Bible translation was pioneered by missionaries of Eastern Christianity in the seventh century or even earlier, whereas from the Catholic side, clear historical narrative has recorded Bible translation work in the thirteenth century by John of Montecorvino (1247–1328) into a Tatar language. Sadly, this work was not preserved. The earliest extant Bible translation in this vast area was published in 1661 in the Siriya language of Taiwan. This article reports on two major digitization projects: digitization of old Chinese Bibles (1707–1960), including 51 translations in total, and digitization of Bibles in Han dialects/fangyan and indigenous languages (1661–1960)—about 50 languages (including dialects) and 60 translations. These two projects represent the largest and most systematic full-text digitization of the Bible heritage of the area ever undertaken.

Cenzura w Biblii

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-181
Author(s):  
Marcin Majewski ◽  
Artur Sporniak ◽  
Teresa Szostek ◽  
Michał Czajkowski
Keyword(s):  
Song Of Songs ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Holy Ghost ◽  
Small Letter ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Correct Translation

The article focuses on the analysis of an interview regarding Bible translation and related censorship. The author comments on the statements of one of the interlocutors, adding her own insights and analyses. Bible translators make certain parts of the text more approachable, as was the case with the refrain to Song of Songs, which, in most translations, mentions “embracing” while the protestant Bible contains the correct translation, i.e. “caressing.” Similarly, translators correct the Bible, as they have a different notion of what a sacral text should look like. For example, they introduce neutral phrases instead of offensive words. In Czajkowski’s opinion, translators often censor the Bible, trying to make the text less blunt. However, sometimes discrepancies are a result of not understanding the original text. Not always are these differences a consequence of the translator’s work, though. It is clearly visible e.g. in the case of “pneuma,” a word which can be translated into ghost or soul, spelled with a small letter, or the Holy Ghost. The author does not support the so-called “inclusive” translation. The inspired text should not be changed. Such changes can be replaced with explanations or comments. In order to discover the original meaning of the Holy Scripture, one can compare one of the Polish translations with translations into other foreign languages or other translations into Polish.

Metaphorical Representations of the Biblical Concepts of Death and Resurrection When Translating in a Buddhist Context

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexey Somov
Keyword(s):  
Target Language ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cognitive Metaphor ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Buddhist Culture

This article applies Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory to the key terms of death and resurrection in the Scriptures and examines the translation of these terms into languages with a traditional Buddhist culture whose worldview is different from that of the Bible. The present analysis indicates that in the conceptual system of the biblical authors, the concept of death is metaphorically described as sleep while resurrection is pictured as waking up and standing up. However, in the Buddhist worldview the concept of the resurrection is absent and the concept of death is not always metaphorically extended as sleep. This article discusses the practical possibilities and limits of the representations of these metaphorical extensions in three Buddhist-context translation projects of the Institute for Bible Translation in Russia: Buryat, Kalmyk, and Tuvan. It also offers some suggestions about searching for their possible representations in the target language.

scholarly journals Biblical conceptual sphere as a concept of Taras Shevchenko's idiostyle and its reverbalization in Ukrainian bible translations

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Oksana Dzera
Keyword(s):  
Word Of God ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Complete Translation ◽  
Old Greek ◽  
Biblical Concepts

The article elaborates the analysis of Ukrainian translations of the Holy Scripture through the prism of Shevchenko’s metabiblical images. Biblical conceptual sphere is defined as a fragment of biblical picture of the world shaped on the basis of Old Hebrew, less frequently Old Greek imagery and represented by the totality of concepts which are connected through overlapping, interrelation, hierarchy and opposition and are thematically grouped. Verbalizers of biblical concepts contain the complex accumulation of senses reflecting correlations between God and people through specific world perception of ancient Hebrews. The mediating link between the Bible prototext and biblical metatexts is created by national translations of the Holy Scripture that shape national biblical conceptual spheres via multiple deviations of the Hebrew and Greek sources. The deviations affect national phraseology as well as individual authors’ interpretations of the Book of Books. Special attention is devoted to recursive deviation which manifests itself when a national biblical conceptual sphere and even national translations of the Bible contain elements of authors’ biblical intertexts. Taras Shevchenko’s poetry is viewed as the primary Ukrainian recursive biblical intertext. His idiostyle is characterized by the verbalization of biblical concepts through overlapping biblical and nationally-bound senses. Metabiblical images of Shevchenko’s idiostyle are tracked down to the Bible translation done by I. Khomenko and edited by I. Kostetskyij and V. Barka. The editors who represented the baroque tradition of the Ukrainian translation domesticated Khomenko’s version and introduced into it elements of the Ukrainian metabiblical conceptual sphere, predominantly Shevchenko’s metabiblical images. I. Khomenko himself did not approve of this strategy and regarded it as a violation of the Word of God. Yet the monastic order of St. Basil the Great that commissioned this translation did not consult the translator before publishing its edited version. Similar domesticating strategy is observed in the first Ukrainian complete translation of the Bible done by P. Kulish, I. Puluj, and I. Nechuj-Levycjkyj in 1903. Shevchenko’s influence is particularly felt in epithets specifying key biblical images, such as enemy (лютий / fierce) and heart (тихе / meek). Though each book of the Holy Scripture in this translation is ascribed to only one translator of the three it seems logical to surmise that P. Kulish, the founder of the baroque translation tradition in Ukraine, was the first to draw images from Shevchenko’s metabiblical conceptual sphere. The article postulates the necessity to perceive Shevchenko’s poetry as a complete Biblical intertext which not only interprets national biblical canon but also generates it.

scholarly journals Lexical Aspects of Russian Bible Translations

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
G. A. Kazakov
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
English Language ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The One ◽  
Church Tradition

The article is devoted to the study of the lexical aspects of Russian Bible translations of the 19th—21st centuries in comparative coverage and is a continuation of a study pre-viously conducted by reference to English Bibles. A historical overview of the existing Russian translations is given (the Synodal translation and the texts preceding it, the New Testament of Bishop Cassian, the Bible of the World Bible Translation Center, the “Central Asian translation”, the translation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Bible of the Inter-national Bible Society, the modern translation of the Russian Bible Society, the “Zaoksky Bible”). Special attention is paid to modern editions. Samples of texts are compared according to the lexical parameters of adaptiveness, terminologicalness, style and literalness. On the basis of this comparison, a classification of the considered translations is proposed, and their typological features and interconnections are established. The lexical nature of translations is interpreted in terms of their sociolinguistic effect (public perception). The data obtained confirms the pattern previously found in the English-language Bibles — the inverse relationship between adaptiveness on the one hand and terminologicalness, high style and literalness of the translation on the other.  In terms of lexical characteristics, the Synodal and the “Central Asian” translations differ most from each other, which is probably due to their focus on church tradition and missionary goals, respectively. 

Textual representation of emotions in Somerset Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence”

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-72
Author(s):  
Sheker A. Kulieva ◽  
◽  
Umeda A. Ovezova
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Selective Method ◽  
The Individual

Somerset Maugham is one of the most “emotionally intense” authors in English literature. His greatest works always reveal the “inner life of the individual” (E. Etkind), a person’s susceptibility to various transformations under the influence of feelings and states (“Theater”, “Of Human Bondage”, “The Moon and Sixpence”). At the same time, the emotions being retransmitted when translating a literary text is one of the most difficult tasks in translation theory. As representatives of the architectonic to comprehend the world, emotions are always culturally specific and often do not have equivalents in another mentality and another language. Such are, for example, the English-language concepts (which, in turn, “explain” the emotion) “melancholia”, “blues” and others. The purpose of this work is to explain semantically the category of “emotionality” and understand its ideological and thematic significance in a literary text by comparing the material of two languages — the original English and Russian as the target language. The methods we have taken in the process of working on the text: descriptive, explanatory, emotion thematisation, denotative analysis, emotive analysis, hermeneutic, conceptual, and selective (method of sampling passionary couplings that is slots). Research hypothesis: The category of emotionality is involved in the reconstruction of characters’ images at the level of text perception (the theory of respondents). The means to retransmit emotions when translating a text depends on the mental attitudes of different ethnic groups, therefore, it is necessary to identify “intersection points” that are equally acceptable both for the original text and for its translation.

Bases and Models Revisited: The Importance of Using Different Types of Reference Translations

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Robert A. Bascom
Keyword(s):  
Functional Model ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Clear Advantage ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Different Types

In a 1979 article in The Bible Translator, Harold Fehderau developed a basic theoretical outline for what subsequently became common practice in many Bible translation projects—consulting both a formal “base” translation and a functional “model” translation in the language(s) of wider communication in the region. The starting point for this approach is the fact that most translation projects worldwide did not (and still do not) work directly with the source languages, but rather work(ed) with the biblical text by way of a single intermediate translation in the language(s) of wider communication within the local context. The clear advantage of this practice is that translators will by definition be translating from the text they are best able to understand, which presumably gives them the best chance to represent the original text well. But there are pitfalls to this method, some of which Fehderau alluded to in his article. One such pitfall will now be examined, from a consultant visit to the Tojolabal translation project being carried out in southern Mexico.

scholarly journals Translation Methods Found in New Testament Bible of Mark’s Gospel

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-179
Author(s):  
Ni Wayan Swarniti
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Formal Method ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Translation Methods

Language is one of the important things in human life. By using the language, we can communicate with others. This research tried to analyze the bible translation by using methods of translation theory by Newmark (1988). This research was a qualitative research that focused to analyze the Gospel according to Mark. Bible entitled New Testament (2005) was published by The Indonesian Bible Society for The Gideons International. It was printed by Percetakan Lembaga Alkitab Indonesia. The book consists of 727 pages. Informal method was used to present the results of the analysis. It was the explanation of the translation methods used. Formal method was used to describe the table of the frequency of the translation methods applied in the bible translation found in new testament bible of Mark’s gospel. The translation methods found in data source were word for word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, free translation, idiomatic translation, and communicative translation. Adaptation was not found in all chapters of data source. The most translation method applied in new testament bible of Mark’s gospel was free translation. Free translation had the highest percentage in every chapter in new testament bible of Mark’s gospel. In the other word, the translator tried to transfer the meaning from source text into target text with changing the form based on cultures in target language.

scholarly journals The Zulu version of the old testament from a typological perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-225
Author(s):  
Victor Porkhomovsky ◽  
Irina Ryabova
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
Canonical Text

The present paper continues typological studies of the Bible translation strategies in different languages. These studies deal with passages and lexemes in the canonical text of the Biblia Hebraica, that refl ect ancient cultural and religious paradigms, but do not correspond to later monotheist principles of Judaism and Christianity. The canonical Hebrew text does not allow of any changes. Thus, two translation strategies are possible: (1) to preserve these passages in the text of the translation (a philological strategy), (2) to edit them according to the monotheist principles (ideological strategy). The focus in the present paper is made on the problem of rendering the name of the ancient Semitic goddess ’ashera, attested as the companion of the supreme gods in certain traditions and pantheons (’El /’Il/, Ba‘al, YHWH). Two strategies of rendering the name of ’ashera are attested in different Bible translations: (1) to preserve the name of the goddess (philological strategy), (2) to eliminate this name or to replace it with the names of her fetishes and sacred objects (ideological strategy). The Zulu case of rendering the name ’ashera is particularly looked at in this paper.

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