Featured Translating grammatical forms

Today Uncle Miya and I were working on Luke 8 when we had a difference as to how to translate the aorist passive infinitive qerapeuqhnai (to be healed) in v. 43. I felt we should preserve the passive in the Japanese, but Uncle Miya wanted to change it to a normal present tense, "The doctors could not heal her." Note the NIV ("no one could heal her") and NEB (New English Bible, “nobody had been able to cure her”), as opposed to the KJV ("neither could be healed of any"), the ESV ("she could not be healed by anyone") and the HCSB (“could not be healed by any”).

I argued that there were nuances in preserving the passive that was lost in making the verb active, ergo: (1) Saying no one could heal her makes the doctors the operators seeking to heal, but in reality she was the one doing her best to be healed. (2) Saying that no one could heal her leaves out the possibility that Christ could heal her, whereas saying that "she could not be healed of any" means that the doctors did not heal her, not that no one could. Uncle Miya agreed and we preserved the passive form in our translation. (3) Making her the one trying to be healed leaves open the possibility that she had been deceived by quacks taking her money.

Translating not only every word, but the grammatical forms as much as possible, means that the nuances of the original are preserved in the translation. However, concentrating on the semantics, that is the meaning of the individual words, and ignoring the grammatical forms, means that much of the nuance of the original is lost in the translation.

In spite of this, advocates of dynamic equivalence mock and look down on "formal equivalence" translators and translations. Here is one example of that in a definition from a DE book:

"formal correspondence: quality of a translation in which the features of the form of the source text have been mechanically reproduced in the receptor language. Typically, formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labor unduly hard" (The Theory and Practice of Translation, Eugene Nida and Charles Taber, p. 201).

Regardless of being mocked and looked down on, I will continue to translate the grammatical forms literally, and believe they are very important in preserving the nuances of the original.

 

Only if that nuance is in the original, but I'm not sure it is.

 

Yes, use it in any way that is profitable. :thumbs:

 

Yes I have. That doesn't mean I won't try, and even DE agrees with this, though they don't like the term "word-for-word."

Prove that I haven't preserved the nuances.

And your point is?

Hardly likely that I got my feelings hurt by a book, the main author of which is now dead.

Nope.

Grammatical form carries nuances.

 

Yes, this is all correct. You have brought up the issue of authorial intent. I see the following ways to determine authorial intent:

(1) By the syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (meaning) of the original.
(2) By the culture and society and history of the times: grammatical-historical hermeneutics.
(3) By context: the immediate context of the passage, the context of the book, the context of the author's normal usage (in authors with more than one book, like Luke, John, Peter and Paul) and the context of the entire written revelation (and this point is what separates Bible translation from that of other documents, the theological presuppositions we've developed).

 

Folks, think about this statement. According to this, when you say "I will go to the store" (future tense), you might as well have said, "I went to the store" (past tense). According to Rippon, they mean the same, since according to him, "Form does not = meaning."

 

Let's consider how to translate a grammatical form into a language which has no direct equivalent grammatical form. For example, in the example in the OP we have a Greek aorist infinitive. Japanese can handle an aorist okay, but has no infinitive. What then is the translator to do?

This is where most word-for-word treatments fail, because most translators operate in English or some other language in the Indo-European family. Languages in this family have commonality in their grammatical forms. However, going from an Indo-European language to an Asian or tribal language poses problems, since many of these languages do not have infinitives and the like.

Dr. James Price has solved this problem with a linguistic tool called transformational grammar (also called generational grammar). (See his magnum opus A Theory for Bible Translation: An Optimal Equivalence Model, but make sure you learn Hebrew first!)

What we cannot do in such cases is look for a direct equivalent grammatical form, because it does not exist. What we do rather is, by using transformations in the target language, find an optimally equivalent form.

For example, Japanese has no future tense. An early missionary had a "eureka" moment when he thought he had found the Japanese future tense, but in reality he had found the tentative verb (also called the presumptive). Following this error, the first Japanese colloquial translation was roundly criticized for translating the Greek future with the Japanese tentative, thus translating Acts 1:11 as, "This same Jesus...may come in like manner."

In Japanese, when speaking of a definite future action (as opposed to a possible action, which is a subjunctive type meaning), we use the present tense. So when I led a woman to the Lord in our prayer meeting once, and she said to me, "I come to church Sunday," I knew she really meant it!

Surely through this illustration you can see that the grammatical forms of a language have definite nuances to convey, and even semantic content (meaning). After all, each grammatical form is a word. Got it?

 

Hi, brother, I hope you are doing well.

I would be happy to have Rippon clarify his statement. It seemed black and white to me, and Rippon being intelligent can surely see on reflection that as the statement stands it is inaccurate.

I think the view that all grammatical forms have nuance or even core meaning is easily proven by the fact that we have huge Greek grammars to explain said meaning, such as A. T. Robertson (over 1200 pages) and Daniel Wallace (over 750 pages), and I use a huge Japanese grammar by Samuel E. Martin (1084 pages). So I contend that the burden of proof is on those who say grammatical forms do not necessarily carry meaning. I would like to know of a single Greek form that does not have nuance.

I could give 100s, even 1000s of Greek forms that carry meaning, but let me point you to one set of forms that every first year student pulls his or hair out over, the prepositions. Various of the prepositions change completely in meaning depending on the case of the words following in the prepositional phrase. (I am simplifying greatly.) For example, dia (dia) means "through" with the genitive, but "because of" with the accusative. The word meta (meta) with the genitive means "with" but with the accusative means "after." Since dia occurs in 580 verses and meta occurs in 445 verses, there with little effort we have a huge number of examples where form inarguably carries meaning.

Yes, there are many grammatical forms in Greek the nuance of which cannot be translated into certain languages (including English). For example, Japanese and Chinese have no articles, so the Greek definite article usually cannot be translated. Again, the Greek perfect tense has no equivalent in Japanese (and Chinese has no tenses!), so the nuance is often lost.

So yes, there are Greek and Hebrew grammatical forms which do not have equivalents in various languages. However, this does not mean that there is no meaning or nuance in the original form. In fact, this very fact points up the priority of the original documents over any translation, a point I am sure you will agree with. Scholarly exegesis simply must go to the original languages and their grammatical and semantic forms for the final word on the meaning of a passage.

 

Sorry, but my NASB is at the church and I don't know what statement you are referring to in their preface. But it sounds like they would agree with me, not Rippon. Since there is no such English word as verbage, I assume you mean verbiage here, "the manner in which something is expressed in words" (American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed., 1996, accessed through MS Bookshelf 98). Therefore they mean that they try to get the original grammar into the target language.

 

Yes, correct. To translate you must do exegesis, and I hold to the grammatical-historical method.

 

According to this quote, the NASB translators agree with me, not Rippon, since as you say they make a big deal about nuances in the Greek grammatical forms. Therefore, as is well known, the NASB is done with a literal method and is not DE.

One topic brought up by this extended quote is, at what point do we abandon strict literalism (as with Young's Literal Translation) and choose readability? That is a complicated issue and deserves a thread on its own, but the short answer and the principle we follow with our Japanese translation is: does a strictly literal rendering detract from readability, thus confusing the reader rather than conveying God's truth, or does it produce an understanding of God's truth? This is what the NASB (a notably literal translation) translators are saying in their preface. According to them in this preface, the nuances of the original verb form are often not able to be rendered into English.