Comments on: Mounce on Translating

By: Kirk Lowery

Kirk Lowery — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:17:20 +0000

I’ve not followed the ins and outs of translation theory for a few years, so this comment may be tangential to the main conversation:

I was one of the translators for the Holman Christian Standard version (1 Kings). I of course ran across many of these same problems. (Translating the building of the Temple was a nightmare!) One of the frustrations was the business of one-to-one correspondence at every level: lexical, morphological and syntactic.

I’ve always wondered why translations don’t take more advantage of margin- and footnotes. If the goal is translating the message correctly, even a very literal translation is going to be a distance from the original. Often, I could not find a one-to-one correspondence. Sometimes English simply had no equivalent that was not very paraphrastic. It wasn’t that the Hebrew was always unclear or ambiguous. To the contrary. But for English, one had to “unscramble” the words.

So why not choose the “best” English equivalent even if it is grammatically distant? And then use notes to explain the problem or issue to the reader. The major translations do this rarely, at least, to my satisfaction.

In this one respect, the most advanced English translation today I know of is the Net Bible.

By: Karyn

Karyn — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:17:53 +0000

UPDATE: Looks like some others have pointed out this post by Mounce too. John Hobbins takes the list and smooths it out a little to make it more broadly applicable here. John mentions that he heard about the post from Jim Getz, here. (I had seen it on the Koinonia blog earlier this morning in my Google Reader... we must have all been on the same brain wave!)

By: Karyn

Karyn — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:49:20 +0000

Hi Bob, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree with you that John Hobbins' post today is very helpful (and one readers should definitely take the time to investigate).

By: Bob MacDonald

Bob MacDonald — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:34:10 +0000

1. concordance – to start with an eirenic comment – yes. But the reason for concordance is in the sound not necessarily in the meaning. When the whole gospel can be reduced to one word: hear, then the sound is important. It is not the train of thought. The training will happen when the hearer has to do some work. What is a ‘train of thought’? Translate that one into Greek for Paul while composing Romans. “Paul, dear, we simply cannot follow your 55 step argument. Ten is simply too many sections. God forbid we should be dependent on your intellect for salvation! If you will, there are just too many animals in your (camel) train.”
2. one for one – surely this one should be number 1. But there is no way that this can be done with conjugated verbs. It is even funnier when you think of enclitic languages like Hebrew. The DNA of English is all unrolled.
3. Less is definitely more. Mounce’s post on Are ants people is a good example. Of course ants are a people. Even Google translate knows that: les fourmis sont un peuple.
4. Euphony – much more than euphony is required. Dramatic reenactment. Similar sounds. Wordplay.
5. ‘must make some sense’ is a non-starter. Make sense is too much an abstraction. The pornographers get it quicker than the pious. And at least in the Hebrew Bible, there are plenty of places where the transmitted copy seems to be fully enigmatic to all of us. (I have not tried much translation from Greek – too modern for me).
6. open to misunderstanding. Is it implied that we have already understood or could understand? It must be open to misunderstanding so that our God has something to correct in us as we draw out the words from our texts.

7. Dig. We must dig and reconstruct through language and history what we can around the text that we have. I think John’s argument for reconstruction here is a post today is a sound one.