“When we speak of translation in this chapter, we do not have in mind a literal word-for-word translation. This is what Charles Kraft speaks of as translation by formal correspondence, and examples might be a translation of the English table into the Latin mensa, the Italian tavolo, the Spanish mesa, the German Tisch, or the Ilokano lamisaan. People have such a literal translation model in mind when they ask what might be the Filipino equivalent of the Greek homoousios so that Filipinos might be able to express exactly what the Council of Chalcedon meant in its famous Christological definition or how one might render Being in a language such as Japanese.
A formal-correspondance approach to translation can never get at the deep structures of a language which are more than simple vocabulary and grammar correspondances. Words carry much more than denotative meanings; the are the vehicles of all sorts of emotional and cultural connotations as well. Languages such as Hebrew, from which one translates the Bible and Ilokano, into which on translates, do not have the same ideas of subject, verb, object voice as do western languages such as Latin or German or English. As Kraft observes:
Word-for-word translation and the consistency principle are, however, the result of misunderstandings of the nature of langauge and of the translation process itself. The results of such emphases tend to be wooden and foreign-sounding. The literalists’ focus sees but dimly the livingness of the original encoding of the message. Furthermore, it often ignores completely the contemporary cultural and linguistic involvement of any but the most theologically indoctrinated of the readers. Its aim is to be “faithful to the original documents.” But this “faithfulness” centres almost exclusively on the surface-level forms of the linguistic encoding in the source langauge and their literal transference into corresponding linguistic forms in the receptor language. “
From MODELS OF CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY (Faith and Cultures Series) by Stephen Bevans
14 replies on “Bevans on Translation”
Word for word is not translation. A truly bi-lingual child is said to think in ‘meta-language’. What is interesting is that they are hopeless at word for word translation. To them it sounds stupid, meaningless and very humerous as it is both ridiculous and the meaning and nuances are consistently wrong. They just go from hearing words in one language, that going into meta language and the whole naturally expressed with the exact same meaning, spot on accurate, in the other language. THAT is real translation. It is all about meaning, rather than words.
So I can’t use Google translate to do self-translation of my next missiological block-buster into Yoruba?
Only if you are writing a comedy show!
A good illustration of this is this Spanish business whose products all feature literal translation of Spanish phrases word for word into English. Those who understand Spanish you are in for a treat.http://www.superbritanico.com/
“Translating worlds, not words”.
One basis for not word for word is in the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament. The quotes are not from the Hebrew Bible, but from the ‘Septuagint’ (LXX for short) translation of the Hebrew into Greek done after 333 BC when Alexander of Macedonia took the lands around the Mediterranean and Greek became the international language. LXX contains the whole Old Testament and also, embarrassingly, the deutero canon (otherwise called the Apocrypha by Protestants). This was the Bible of Jesus and the New Testament writers, who never once make any attempt at saying the Hebrew is better or that ‘in Hebrew it instead says…’. This is why the Greek / Russian / Coptic Orthodox use LXX for translating the Old Testament, because it had the seal of approval of the New Testament. It is why English Bibles have Old Testament quotes in the New Testament as different from their translation from Hebrew. However, when it comes to such as Dead Sea, the English Bibles follow LXX and not Hebrew, as Hebrew has ‘Yam Suf’, which is consistent and means ‘Sea of Reeds’. We only have Red Sea due to the Greek of LXX.
The use of LXX in the New Testament is mainly other than word for word. For example:
NIV Genesis 2.24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
This is only once, in Mark 10.7-8, word for word LXX. The other three instances of it in the New Testament are different, being some form of paraphrase.
Other Old Testament quotes, for example, those in Romans, are even more paraphrased.
This means then that the form of quotes used in the New Testament is not actually word for word. They show a strong inclination and acceptance of being meaning based. The mere fact the New Testament does not quote word for word from Hebrew shows us this also. The fact it has ‘Red Sea’ as against Sea of Reeds shows it is meaning which is paramount.
The use of LXX in the New Testament shows us the whole aim is to communicate in a language people could then most easily have access to. It was the Greek, not of the classical literary world, but of the living, everyday world. That meant far more to Jesus and the New Testament writers than any word for word idea. It was to get the heart of God made known to the heart of the common person. They needed it in language as they used it. That, in his utmost wisdom, is exactly how God gave them it in the New Testament, Old Testament quotes included.
God inspired the New Testament in that the LXX dropping of YHWH was replaced with ‘the Lord’, in spite of the fact YHWH has ‘living / existing’ as its root. Jesus never complained once about that! It was more important that it communicated God rather than even the precise, word for word meaning of the Hebrew.
My thesis is then that the theory of Bible translation has to be based on how the New Testament used LXX, often not in a word for word manner. God’s heart is to accurately communicate his truth.
RT @kouya: An excellent quote on the folly of word-for-word translation from Bevans… http://t.co/2gVGL5LYw7
Ed Lauber liked this on Facebook.
Leslie Brinkerhoff liked this on Facebook.
Andy Milligan liked this on Facebook.
Erica Deakin liked this on Facebook.
Nora McNamara liked this on Facebook.
Nev McCormack liked this on Facebook.
Paul Bailie liked this on Facebook.