ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

Eerdmans just published:

Translating the New Testament: Text, Translation, Theology
Series: McMaster New Testament Studies
Stanley E. Porter (editor), Mark J. Boda (editor)

And I’m seriously considering requesting a review copy — though Eerdmans seems to be much more picky about who it sends review copies to. But I’ll probably give it a try.

At this point though, I’ll taking a rather standoff-ish stance regarding the book.It’s a book on translation. Right?

So why aren’t there any professional translators in the list of contributors.

Barbara Aland
Mark J. Boda
Philip Comfort
Alain Gignac
Edith M. Humphrey
Luke Timothy Johnson
Richard N. Longenecker
Matthew Brook O’Donnell
Stanley E. Porter
Maurice A. Robinson
Elsa Tamez
Francis Watson
Khiok-Khng (K. K.) Yeo

We’ve got theologians, text critics, NT scholars, OT scholars, but not translators. There is not a single scholar on this list whose central academic specialty is translation. Why couldn’t Mildred Larson have contributed? Ernst-August Gutt? Katherine Barnwell? John Callow? Peter Silzer? Ronald Sim? Peter Unseth? Ernst Wendland? Catherine Rountree?

Yeah, you get the idea.

There are a variety of reasons why the English Perfect and the Greek Perfect must be distinguished in spite of their shared name and similarities.

Greek students are generally taught to use their intuition in terms of deciding whether to translate a Greek perfect with an English perfect or with an English present. But rarely (ever?) is there any discussion of how these two grammatical forms differ in their usage in a cross-linguistic sense. That is, the English Perfect can be used in the context X where the Greek Perfect would be infelicitous or ungrammatical.

Well today, I’m going to give you at least one way that I found about two weeks ago (I had to search for it to find it again). This assumes that the Greek of Joshua is relatively close enough to natural Greek that this is a valid usage. I haven’t had time to check other texts.

Joshua 13:8: ταῖς δὲ δύο φυλαῖς καὶ τῷ ἡμίσει φυλῆς Μανασση, τῷ Ρουβην καὶ τῷ Γαδ, ἔδωκεν Μωυσῆς ἐν τῷ πέραν τοῦ Ιορδάνου κατ̓ ἀνατολὰς ἡλίου, δέδωκεν αὐτὴν Μωυσῆς ὁ παῖς κυρίου…
But to the two tribes and the half tribe of Manasseh, Reuben and Gad, Moses gave (an inheritance to them) in the land beyond the Jordan eastward. Moses the servant of the Lord gave them …

From there, it goes on to list the lands they received. What’s striking about this. Well for one, we see the Perfect’s move toward the Aorist, but we also see a significant way in which the Greek Perfect is very, very different from the English Perfect.

Moses is dead. Moses was dead when the book was written and Moses was dead when the events described here in chapter 13 transpired (assuming for the sake of argument they did – this is a linguistics blog not a history blog). The English perfect cannot be used with a subject the speaker knows to be deceased. The sentence:

*Moses the Lord’s servant gave them X.

is not felicitous in English.

And that, my friends, is one way in which the Greek and English Perfects are different. This sort of example is relatively easy to recognize intuitively when dong translation, but it is still helpful to recognize and understand the reason why you’ve used the English past perfective verb “gave” instead of the perfect. And that’s what I’m interested in here. The why of things.

UPDATE:

There is a pragmatic felicity condition on the use of the perfect: the subject of a Perfect sentence must be in a position to receive the participant property. Perfect sentences are infelicitous when this is not met. In the following well-known example the person referred to by the subject NP is not alive at the RT [Reference Time]. Consider (20), uttered in 1989.

(20) Einstein has lived in Princeton.

This sentence is grammatical but infelicitous when uttered at a time after the death of Eisten (Jespersen 1931:60), Chomsky (1970:85). We explain this in terms of the participant property. Einstein cannot bear the participant property in 1989, the time of the utterance of (20), and so it is pragmatically impossible to ascribe it to him. this is the force of the example. The felicity requirement, then, is reoughly as in (21):

(21) Felicity condition for the present Perfect
The person to which the subject nounphrase [sic] refers must be pragmatically able to bear the property ascribed to them.

The notion of ‘Current Relevant’ is sometimes invoked to explain the infelicity of sentences like this. (Jesphersen 1931: 47, 57, et seq; McCoard 1978, ch. 2).

Carlota Smith, The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed.; Studies in Linguistics & Philosphy 43; Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1997), 108.

Also, I should note that an English Past Perfect, which is traditionally associated with the Greek Pluperfect would also be acceptable here: Moses had given…

It’d be such an incredibly translation if it would be willing to use “brothers and sisters” every once in a while!

So many things I like otherwise…

Translate ἀδελφοι as “brothers and sisters” when the context would necessitate it. Why? Because when you translate lexis rather than reference you remove the text from it’s historical setting. Last time I checked, Christians believe they had a historical faith, a faith grounded in history.

So why doesn’t that history matter for the HCSB?

It seems that the former is far, far more popular than the latter.

But I enjoy writing about the latter much more.

Sigh…

I commented on Paul Helm’s post about translation a while back — commented in the sense of writing a post about it; Dr. Helm’s blog doesn’t allow comments. He’s written a bit of a response post, which is worth reading.

I won’t get into the entire post, but I would like to provide some thoughts (and hopefully at the same time fulfill a request by a few readers to delineate my own more positive thoughts about translation). I won’t quote the post itself because I’d rather you go and read it (Again HERE).

Dr. Helm can correct me if I’m wrong (I had hoped that he’d leave a comment on my last post), but it appears to me that he is once again confusing terminology more than anything else. His preference for Congitive Equivalence seems to have very little to do with language. And thus my previous protest continues to be relevant. His reasoning for a change in terminology has nothing to do with what the terminology means when used by translators and everything to do with his own personal interpretation of the terms. That is to say, Dr. Helm has not treated the terms within their linguistic (as in the field) context. They are linguistic terms with technical definitions. Thus rejecting functional equivalent because a knife can be used as a screw driver is irrelevant. Helm does not help this never ending conversation about translation by not understanding these terms they way they were intended to be understood. And for that reason, the relevance of Helm’s critique is dependent upon the relevance of authorial intention. Currently, he seems to be ignoring it for the sake of philosophical musings (i.e. him original post was written as his philosophical theology post for the month of September).

Now, moving on to the more constructive statements that I have for discussing translation methodology. What follows consists of a bit of history, a bit of linguistics, and a bit of commentary on translation practice & method.Let me begin by trying to explain why Nida used the terms he did and what was supposed to be meant by them. The key term here is the Functional in Functional Equivalence.

The only reason Nida changed the term Dynamic to Functional was exactly that people interpreted technical terminology with non-technical meaning. That is, when we talk about Function in linguistics & translation, we are talking about Linguistic Function.

Here are some kinds of Linguistic Functions (this is far from exhaustive and doesn’t even begin to deal with figurative language):

1. Grammatical Functions – Subject, Object, Oblique, Complement, & Adjunct (Predicate could also potentially be placed here).
2. Semantic Functions – Agent, Patient, Theme, Recipient, etc.
3. Pragmatic Functions – Topic, Focus, Background Information, & Completive Information.
4. Communicative Functions – Illocutionary & Perlocutionary Speech Acts.

All languages relate these various functions to each other in various ways (though some languages do not have grammatical functions in the traditional sense) to express meaning. And each language differs in how they are used by it’s speakers.

The act of translation involves translating these various functions of language. This is going to look different depending on your framework for translation.

A so-called “literal” or “essentially literal” approach to translation focuses chiefly on #1, Grammatical Functions. Indeed, translation for the “literal” translator isn’t so much word-for-word as much as simply aligning subjects, object, etc. of the source language with their respective counterpart in the receptor language. The “as free as necessary” part of typical “literal” translation comes in when merely translating grammatical function clashes with translating other kinds of functional information — and it’s not that “literal” translations just  ignore the other linguistic function so much as they simply leave them to the intuition of the translator.

And that’s why I’m generally critical of such methods. The intuitions of the translator aren’t necessarily reliable and were other functions studied and examined in their own right, we could rely more on the grammar of the source & receptor languages more than we do upon translator intuition. But it’s also that I’m only critical of the method. It is possible for a decent translation to come out. But this is dependent upon the translators not the method — and it tends to be more inconsistent than a translation that has both method and skilled translators (the NASB is a perfect example, which is typically annoyingly “literal,” but every once in a while is surprisingly paraphrastic — seriously).

When we come to so-called Dynamic Equivalence/Functional Equivalence, the goal of the method is more encompassing than merely grammatical functions. Unfortunately, historically, two things happened. First of all, many people who misunderstood Nida had absolutely no interest in translating grammatical functions. Secondly, the earliest translations attempting to implement the methodology tended to only look at communicative functions. Historically, this was very much a reactionary move on the part of the translators where the pendulum went too far in the other direction. This essentially functioned as bad press for the methodology, since it looked way too much like paraphrase than a rigorous translation method. The term Dynamic which was often interpreted in a literary sense rather than a technical term didn’t help. And that’s exactly why Nida, in the 80’s, switched to Functional for the name.

But also, today, there are few different frameworks in which translation is done, Functional Equivalence being one of them. Another one is Relevance Theory, which I won’t get into here. They’re not the same thing, but they do hold a few things in common: 1) they both work on accurately representing the above functions I’ve described and 2), they stand in contrast to the typical “literal” translation. But probably more important is the fact that they both seek to translate meaning as expressed by various functions of language. And for that reason, I’m typically comfortable with referring to both under the umbrella term Meaning Based Translation.

But there is another reason that Meaning Based Translation is my preferred term. That’s because while both Functional Equivalence and Relevance Theory have extremely similar goals in translation, neither is a perfect model (though they both have many more strengths methodologically than the “literal” approach). My own approach to translation is (though my current experiences with translation has been on my own rather than on a language project) rather eclectic taking what I view as the strengths from a variety of contemporary models that focus on accurately representing language in a more holistic sense (i.e. my list of Functions above).

Many of you know that I was the New Testament chair of the ESV translation. This project has consumed thousands of hours, most of them enjoyable. I am happy with the ESV. As a formal equivalent translation done in the translation stream of the KJV / ASV / RSV, it has proven itself. And while the committee will be constantly looking at issues and questions submitted by people like you, my work on the ESV was largely done.

But a few weeks ago I received a most amazing email from my friend Mark Strauss (who I have been picking on lately in this blog). What was amazing was that just the night before I was sharing with Robin (my wife) how much I missed translation work. I learned so much on the ESV, things I have never taught in any Greek class at any level. I told her, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to be in the NIV committee? I would love it if I were asked to be on it.”

–Dr. Bill Mounce

Read the whole thing HERE (I’m guessing the Koinonia blog will pick it up with Monday’s with Mounce tomorrow).

My own comments:

I’m incredibly excited about this. Dr. Mounce is the ESV translator whom I hold in high respect. I think he will do a great job and I know that he thinks quite thoughtfully about both the Greek language and the English language with reference to usage. I most definitely wish him the best in this move and I hope he continues to develop his Greek skills and comprehension of the text and language.

For sometime, I’ve been an advocate for people who do not know the original languages (& probably never will) to learn how to meaningfully look at and compare differences of translation, paragraphing, & formatting in using multiple translations rather than simply using a “literal” translation.

But it has been only recently that I’ve realized that many people don’t think such a thing is possible.

And so, I’ve created a poll here to see what you, my readers, think on this issue. I’d also be interested in your comments as well.

I’m particularly interested in the thoughts of those whose answers are based on experience in both practices — if such people exist, but everyone’s thoughts on this question are definitely welcome & encouraged.

1. Language is complicated.
2. Two languages together are twice as complicated.
3. Translation only accentuates #2.

“Literal Translations get you closer to the original languages than other translation.”

No. They just sound funny. They’re still in English. The only thing that’s going to get you closer to the original languages is learning the original languages.

And I say “striking” in a positive sense.

Now Challies is definitely not trained in linguistics or Bible translation, but he is a smart guy and he slight discomfort with Ryken’s book is significant. In all of his praise of the book, there’s an underlying issue that appears to nag at him.

He writes:

I must say, though, that a weakness remains that, in my mind, threatens to undo his argument and it is this: his definition of an essentially literal translation remains just a little bit too nebulous, a little too subjective.

This is good. Because it is the point. Most of what Ryken give his readers tends to be rhetorical attacks against the other side with much ink spilled over how subjective and inaccurate meaning based translations are. But when he moves to his own “theory.” We simply don’t find much theory.

I would encourage Challies to read a few more books on translation from other perspectives. What is unfortunate is that there are not many accessible books on translation for the layperson, though perhaps Willis Barnestone’s The Poetics of Translation would be a decent start, though that’s on my wife’s recommendation, not my own…since I haven’t read it yet.

And I also need to write more myself about what I actually think regarding translation. I’ve been challenged a few posts back to write positively about translation for a bit rather than always being negative & critical. Perhaps I’ll see about filling up that gap in the next couple weeks…