Featured Linguistics and Bible Translation

Actually, I was the one who posted this not 37818. I answered your request right away. And you are correct that the participle in James 1:15 is aorist, though I said present. But it still has Aktionsart and verbal aspect, both important in interpretation. And so it is not just "completed action." So I believe I completely answered your request. And everything I wrote was germane, IMO. I'm sorry you don't see that.

And concerning participles, we have them in English as well as Greek. I asked if you knew what a participle was in order to ascertain your level of understanding of what I was going to say. I now know your level of understanding. Thank you.

 

Hoping that the last of the sidetracks is finished (this is not a thread on why it is not helpful to learn Greek), I'll try t get back to the OP.

There are scholars who object to the use of modern linguistics in hermeneutics (and thus in Bible translation). In particular, Robert Thomas, formerly of the Master's Seminary (seems to be retired now) is one. And I plan to talk about that. However, first I want to give more background.

Language, by Leonard Bloomfield (1933), was a ground-breaking book in descriptive linguistics. My copy was my father's textbook at Wheaton College in the 1940s, when he was preparing to be a missionary. Descriptive linguistics is just what it sounds like: describing language for what it is.

However, even before that, Edward Sapir wrote a famous book on linguistics, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921). His field was structural linguistics, which looks at a particular language as being self-contained. That's not important to this thread, but what is relevant is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf was his student), which says that translation is ultimately impossible. All we can do is get an approximation of meaning from one language to another. This was linguistic relativism--the idea that language shapes culture rather than culture shaping language.

Do you agree? Is it impossible to correctly translate truth from one language to another?

 

Why do you keep saying this? I have said already that I have never said this in my entire life.

And the odd thing is, you are the guy who has posted thread after thread after thread with your views on how the translation of various verses or words or sentences should take place according to the Greek semantics.

 

"Grasp the message," which you said, is a general statement. Any Christian can grasp the message of a passage, meaning the truth taught in a passage. I have said nothing different. However, there are nuances that cannot be understood unless it is from the source language in any translation effort, not just Bible translation. I stand by my statement, your misinterpretation of it not withstanding.

In James 1:15, the verbal aspect of the aorist participle "it is finished" is that the Greek looks at the complete action. The semantic fact that a different verb is in this passage for "finished" than that used in the cry of Jesus on the cross is also significant.

By your denying that there are any nuances in the verse that cannot be understood, you are de facto showing that I am correct. Your lack of understanding does not prove your point, it proves mine.

Now, due to the fact that I have answered you already, I'll not answer again on this point if you continue to belabor the point.

 

Aaaaaaand, once again I've put Van back on ignore. There's a great Japanese word I think about him whenever he shows up: 煩い！

P. S. Don't look for this Japanese word on Google translate. It gets both the pronunciation and meaning wrong.

 

To try to get back to the OP, I talked about linguistic relativity in Post #66, and asked if you think truth can be translated.

There is a great book on that very theme, Translating Truth, by Wayne Grudem, Leland Ryken, C. John Collins, Vern S. Poythress, and Bruce Winter (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005). The book promotes "essentially literal" Bible translation, and makes the point that an essentially literal translation is a better vehicle for declaring God's truth than a dynamic equivalent (functionally equivalent) one is.

"'Essentially literal' does not mean totally literal. It means that a translation strives to find the English word or combination of words that most accurately corresponds to the words of the original text. It does not mean translating that original in a way that makes no sense in English. Furthermore, retaining the syntax of the original, though not an irrelevant consideration, is nonetheless not a high priority, inasmuch as Hebrew and Greek syntax is [sic] so different from English syntax" (p. 58).

 

Eugene Nida, famous inventor of the dynamic equivalence theory of translation, embraced the code theory of communication. He wrote, "Language is a code, in the sense that it consists of signs and arrangement of signs. The signs consist largely of lexemes [words seen as lexical units, or entries in a lexicon-JoJ] which serve to represent something to someone" (Nida and Johannes Louw, Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament. Society of Biblical Literature, 1992, p. 21).

Code theory is largely passe. A recent book depicts codes as a possibility within a language, rather than the nature of a language itself (Stephen W. Littlejohn & Karen A. Foss, Theories of Human Communication, 10th ed., 2011). Instead, something called relevance theory has taken its place. The seminal work on this is Relevance Theory, by Ernst-August Gutt (Dallas: SIL, 1992), which completely debunks code theory. Put very simply, the idea of relevance theory is that communication is inferential. That is, a sentence is not simply a code that you say and I have to decode, but it is important to know what you are inferring.

Here's an example. One of our team wanted to make our Japanese translation more honorific, or in American terms, politer. However, as our Japanese partner taught me, a very polite statement in Japanese can actually be an insult. So, you might mean me to infer that I am respected by your polite language, but if I know Japanese respect language well enough, I'll infer that you are insulting me despite the seeming politeness of your statement. Clear as mud?

 

A similar linguistic discipline to relevance theory is called sociolinguistics, defined as, "Any study of language in relation to society (P. H. Matthews, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, 372). I recommended to our linguistics professor that our interns read the little book Sociolinguistics, by Bernard Spolsky (Oxford U. Press, 1998), but she already discusses that in a class, so she didn't see the need. (Shucks! ) However, if you are interested in how translation is influenced by society, this is a good little book (a little over 100 pp.).

Along that line, consider this. There is a huge controversy among translators regarding the use of Allah for "God" in a translation for a Muslim people group. Our Farsi translator completely opposes that, but fortunately for him, there is a different word for "God" in Farsi that is generic. Others think Allah is just a generic name for "God." Any opinions?

 

I didn't know that. The sources I've seen claim that it was the name of the moon god when Mohammed was alive.

 

I'm currently reading Experiencing God (rev.), by Henry and Richard Blackberry, and Claude King. This is the best book I've ever read on the will of God, and I highly recommend it.

Anyway, it quotes Galatians 2:20, so I took a look at it, thinking I knew the grammar. So I'm pretty sure Van would reject this as proving my point (knowing him), but I thought I would share this anyway, because it's a blessing! The verb "crucified" is a perfect passive, though not a participle. (Van got all hung up on the participles, which are certainly more complicated in Greek.) The verbal aspect of the Greek perfect tense is that it represents action in the past with the results carrying on until now. So the verse is saying in essence (an explanation, not a translation), "I was crucified with Christ, and it has affected me since then, so that Christ lives in me."

There are many other examples of Greek verbs I could give, including participles, of how the Greek verbal system is different from English, Japanese, Chinese, or any other language.

 

Going back to descriptive linguistics, after Bloomfield's textbook I mentioned that my Dad used in college, H. A. Gleason wrote, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, rev. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1961). I know, I know, this thread is not that well organized. I'll probably go back to transformational grammar if I mentioned that before. (I think I did.)

Anyway, Gleason defines descriptive linguistics in his preface as "the discipline which studies languages in terms of their internal structures" (p. iii). Then he defines linguistics: "Linguistics is the science which attempts to understand language from the point of view of its internal structure" (p. 2).

From this it should be obvious that descriptive linguistics is a primary tool for the Bible translator. If you know the internal structure of the source language, translation becomes easier. Then, the better you can describe the internal structure of your target language, the easier it is to translate into it.

Thus, the popular Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, by William D. Mounce, has a lot of English grammar in it to help the student grasp Greek grammar. And I have found that the better a student knows English grammar, the easier Greek grammar is for them, though some things are very different between the grammars.

In my case, I loved learning Japanese, because it wasn't my first rodeo. I had taken classes in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was an English minor in college. But the hard parts about Japanese are not the grammar, which is comparatively easy, but the honorifics (polite language) and the 1000s of Chinese characters. I didn't care, I loved it--the gift of God. The two years learning Japanese full time in Saitama and Tokyo were two of the best years of my life.