The Power of Bible Translation (original) (raw)
Related papers
No culture shock? Addressing the Achilles heel of modern Bible translations
Acta Theologica, 2004
No culture shock? Addressing the Achilles heel of modern Bible translations Modem Bible translations are often more sensitive to the needs of their intended readers than to the right of biblical texts to be heard on their own terms as religious artefacts from the ancient Mediterranean world. Since all biblical documents linguistically embody socio-religious meanings derived from ancient Mediterranean societies, they also need to be experienced as different, even alien, by modem readers. Without an initial culture shock in encountering a Bible translation modem people are held prisoners by Western translations of the Bible. Therefore, translations should instil a new sensitivity among modem readers to the socio-cultural distance between them and the original contexts of the Bible. In order to help facilitate this historical awareness, a new generation of "value added" translations must, in creative and responsible ways, begin to provide a minimum amount of cultural information to assist modem readers in assigning legitimate meanings to the linguistic signs encapsulated on the pages of the Bible.
Contemporary Approaches to Bible Translation Origins, Characteristics and Issues
Serie Monografica De Ciencia Das Religioes Coleccao Pensar a Religiao, 2013
For most of the last half of the twentieth century the tendency was to think of Bible translations in terms of a binary opposition between literal or idiomatic, or, in other words, dynamic equivalence versus formal equivalence. Further academic discussion and, especially, the development of the whole academic field of translation studies has led to the problematizing of such a simple dichotomy and to much broader analyses of translation work and products including sociological, cultural, economic, rhetorical and ideological factors. In this essay we will first give an overview of developments in contemporary approaches to Bible translation around the world in the past few decades and then consider some recent translations of the Bible into the Portuguese language and how they relate to some of the themes and issues discussed in the first part of this essay.
When the Church Translates the Bible
2024
This paper presents “Church-Centric Bible Translation” as a theologically formative and capacity-building paradigm of Bible translation. Through multilingual and multimodal interaction with the Scriptures, shaped according to biblical patterns of church and mission, the church that speaks a given language progressively builds their biblical understanding, theological maturity, and translation experience. This iterative process aligns the church’s production of a Bible translation with their growing capacity, ensuring that the pace of the process is commensurate with their ability to reliably and confidently assess the trustworthiness of their translation of the Bible.
Bridging the cultural gap : Bible translation as a case in point
Acta Theologica, 2002
Translation practitioners have always been aware of the fact that translation is not a purely linguistic operation but a means of facilitating communication between members of different cultures. Translation scholars have only recently discovered this fairly obvious aspect of their field-and the functional approach to translation-or skopos theory-was instrumental in turning it into one of the main concerns of modern translation studies. New Testament and early Christian texts refer to a culture from which we are separated by a huge cultural gap. They have been translated and re-translated many times during the past (almost) 2000 years and into almost all languages on the planet. In spite of that, we do not always feel that the cultural gap has really been bridged. Does this justify yet another translation? Together with my husband, Klaus Berger, who is a New Testament scholar at Heidelberg University, I was engaged in a fascinating project: We translated the texts of the New Testament plus a large number of apocrypha from the original Greek (and Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic) into German. It was the first translation of these texts that involved a theologian and a translation scholar, and it was the first translation based on modern functional translation theory. Using a few examples from our translation and comparing them to several translations into other modern languages (such as Afrikaans, English, and French), I would like to show how we went about in order to bridge the cultural gap, making the texts understandable to modern German readers without taking away their strangeness.
Bible Translation as Transformative Language Revitalization
Language vitality through Bible translation, 2015
Bible translators were doing crowd-sourced translation and language revitalization long before these concepts existed. They have made major contributions to the introduction of orthographies, literacies, and texts into languages that were often otherwise exclusively oral. And they continue to make an outstanding contribution to language vitality, as the chapters in this volume amply attest. Bible translation can be transformative for a language, especially during the life of the project itself, when it engages some of the best minds of the community in solving formidably difficult problems in semantic mapping, orthography, metaphor, and language standardi- zation. It may extend in influence far beyond the original project and shine as an example of best practice in ensuring language survival.
Journal of Translation
Bible translation enables the advance of what Lamin Sanneh (2007a) calls a “World Christianity,” a global religion which aims to be at home in every context. As such, Bible translation empowers and yet relativises all languages and cultures, thereby furthering an equality in dignity among the speakers of all the languages of the world. In this paper, we ask: To what extent does the current and blossoming Bible translation movement contribute to the growth and maturing of a World Christianity? In other words, in what ways do current engagements in Bible translation further or hinder the reality of Christianity as a religion that aims to be at home in all languages and cultures? To approach this question, we will use the framework proposed by Andrew Walls (1997), which claims that the process of the transmission and reception of Christianity is multi- generational, involving at least three stages. We will aim to discern the stage at which the current Bible translation movement operate...
Biblical Languages and Bible Translation Practice
Should the Bible be translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek texts? One may wonder why the question even needs to be addressed. However, for those who work with Bible translators across Africa, a ‘yes’ answer might come with a note of caution. This paper will look at a bit of the history of Bible translation practice in reference to Biblical languages, and seek to understand the issues involved. In conclusion, it will propose how we can overcome the challenges of translation from Biblical languages and achieve higher quality and respected translations across Africa.
Acta Theologica, 2004
An overview of recent developments of the discipline which deals with the activity of translation, as well as the implications for Bible translation, is presented. Starting off with a discussion of the disciplinary nature of translation studies, an overview of some developments emphasising the source text, the process of translation, the reception of the translated text, and the cultural-social bound character of translation, is offered. Since the early eighties there has been a tendency within translation studies to move away from the normative and prescriptive approaches to translation and to adopt a descriptive approach towards the study of translated literature. Descriptive translation theorists attempt to account not only for textual strategies in the translated text, but also for the way in which the translation functions in the target cultural system. The implications that these recent theoretical developments have for Bible translation practice and criticism of Bible translations are arrived at in the last instance.
HISTORY AND THEORY OF SCRIPTURE TRANSLATIONS
In the missionary expansion of Christianity, Scripture translations have served as the main catalyst even if they have sometimes been taken for granted. From a historical perspective, it can rightly be argued that Christianity owes its very being to translations. This paper addresses this issue through a threefold working hypothesis: Is there anything going on in translation theory? Are recent translation theories significantly different form that of E.A. Nida? Can Bible translation in Africa contribute anything to translation study? These questions will be dealt with in the second part of this paper. However, the first part of the paper is devoted to the historical background of Bible translation practices. After presenting a working definition of Scripture translation, this part will explore the origin, development and interpretative role of Scripture translations.