October 29, 2001
Scripture translators say their task isn't so easy
___By Chris Herlinger
___Religion News Service
___NEW YORK (RNS)--Translating the Bible, or any other text for that matter, isn't nearly as simple a task as the average reader might believe.
___That was the theme of a recent conference of translators sponsored by the American Bible Society in New York City. The conference addressed a number of issues, but a key question was whether it is ever possible to create a holistic, unified rendering of a text from one language and age to be accurately understood in the language and time of another.
___Context is one key, said Eugene Nida of the Bible society and a pioneer in modern Bible translation. In a keynote address, Nida noted that the sentences around a word, the historical time period of the phrase in question and the features of communication being used are all critical as translators begin their work.
___Take the two-word expression "run down" or its past tense equivalent, "ran down." This simple phrase, Nida said, can have a variety of meanings depending on the context.
___"He ran down the road," "He is run down," "The house is run down," "His eye ran down the list," "He ran down the opposition," all have distinct meanings. "So what does 'run down' mean?" he asked. It only means something in the context of other words, as a kind of "semantic chunk."
___But recognizing that is only the beginning of the translator's work. The nuance of meaning has to be conveyed through the translated "signs" of a different language, which has its own meanings and values and traditions.
___Translation itself, said conference participant Theo Hermans of University College in London, is a "solution to a problem, the problem being an intelligibility barrier caused by language and cultural differences."
___Similarity, he said, is a useful notion because it allows scholars "to map different texts in different languages onto each other and claim that they have something relevant in common."
___But how much do the original and the translation have in common? The question is being debated now with particular fervor because of a larger debate within academia over the meaning of texts.
___Some scholars believe a text has an objective meaning that can be "found out," or discovered, said Andrew Chesterman of the University of Helsinki, Finland. They believe this meaning--"God's Word," for example, in the case of the Bible--"can be transferred to other languages, without changing it substantially," he said.
___But other scholars, Chesterman said, stress that meanings are not already there, "inside" texts. Rather, they are "interpreted by people who read texts, so each person may well interpret the same text differently because different readers have different cultural backgrounds and life experiences."
___"We're all creatures of our context," Hodgson said, noting that he reads as a white North American. "But in each culture, there is a different lens. African-American Christians understand the Exodus story differently than I might. The same is true of Latin Americans reading the Passion narrative."
___The question of universal meaning is particularly vexing when it comes to the Bible, a text that comes to modern readers from Hebrew and Greek, and which itself has roots in other languages, such as Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. The Bible also has a "special status" within the Western tradition.
___"It is in a league of its own, both with regard to the value accorded to it by believers and in respect of the range of types of translations of it through the ages, and the ferocity of the debates surrounding some of those translations," Hermans said.
___A key factor in the history of translating the Bible, Hermans said, is that churches "don't want 'similarity,' they want 'equivalence'--they want a text which they can believe is the word of God even though it is a translated text."
___Beyond these debates, Hermans said, are the challenges posed by the "new media," which are enabling communication on a scale and at a speed previously unimaginable.
___The new media--whether video-based Bibles, Bibles on computer or even the expected development of "virtual Bibles" where people could experience a biblical narrative as a kind of "live experience"--could be as revolutionary as the development of the Guttenberg Bible, Hodgson said.
___"There are dimensions to the new media we're only now grasping," he said. "Every five years, the rules are changing." In this new world, translators will have to expand their work further and become links between an older printed culture and a new media culture, he suggested.
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