Featured Elements of Bible Translation

Take adjectives. Please! They can be some of the most difficult words in any language!

Consider Greek adjectives. First of all, an adjective is, put simply, a word that describes a noun. In English we have such words as big, small, loud, pushy, etc. English adjectives do not usually change in form, whatever the noun they are describing.

Not so Greek adjectives. They are inflected. This means that you must learn the proper suffixes for each adjective: five cases and three genders (masc., fem., neut.), meaning 15 endings for the first declension and 15 for the second declension. Then there are the two-termination adjectives, meaning masc. and fem. are the same endings, and then there is the neuter.

There are three usages for the Greek adjective: the attributive (attributing a quality to the noun), the predicate (can be translated with an "is"), and the substantival (works like a noun when there is a definite article in front of it and no noun after it).

This can be further complicated by the fact that the adjective may or may not have the same endings as the noun! Had enough yet? Say "Uncle"!

But wait until I tell you about Japanese adjectives!

 

Great stuff, but I'm not on the Torah team. Do you have any suggestions for commentaries on the poetic books?

This element of translation is called Scopos Theory, Skopostheorie in German. This is from secular translation studies, but Bible translation theorists are starting to notice it. It was first formulated by the late Hans Vermeer, and another German scholar is currently the leading expert, Christiane Nord, who translated the groundbreaking book by Vermeer and Katharina Reiss, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action. Nord's book is also excellent, Translation as a Purposeful Activity.

This is all well and good, but the most important Bible translation activity nowadays is taking place on the mission fields of the world in third world countries, and some more developed Asian languages. The primary method nowadays consists of a national team and foreign consultants (who have the knowledge you are referring to). The typical third world countries involved do not have prolific scholars like English, German, French, etc. They are usually blessed just to have someone gifted by the Lord in linguistics.

In my mind, there is virtually no more need for translations into Indo-European languages.

 

Textual criticism is definitely an element of Bible translation, and I appreciate Craig's post on OT textual criticism. I'm not planning to address the issues on this thread, since there is so much to it, but Craig is welcome to continue to do so.

 

Thanks! I'll be checking these out--according to my budget. I believe my son owns some of them.

 

Now about adjectives again, consider trying to get the Greek adjective into an Asian language. The Chinese adjective can also function as a verb. Do you look for an equivalent to the Greek adjective? Might not be one. Do you translate the Greek adjective as a verb? Could be, especially if the Greek is a predicate adjective.

Then there is Japanese, which has two kinds of adjectives. First off, there is the Chinese compound, consisting of two Chinese characters, adding a な (na) to get the adjectival meaning. Then there is the regular Japanese adjective, which is inflected. This Japanese adjective can become a past tense verb: 遅い (osoi, slow) can become 遅かった (osokatta, was slow). You can also add a suffix to it to make it an adverb, as in 遅く (osoku, slowly). I could add a lot more here, but surely you see it isn't a simple matter. The adjectival systems of Greek and Japanese are totally different. The translator must make many separate decisions about how to translate those adjectives.

 

Not any more.

 

Correctly translating the gender system of a language can either make or break a translation. As I'm sure all the readers know, there is a controversy about gender neutral translation in the English language. Some giants in theology have opined on the matter. Opposing gender neutral translation are Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem in The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy. Taking the other side we find D. A. Carson in The Inclusive Language Debate. Note that this controversy is culture specific. The non-English world doesn't really care!

My concerns are more for the missionary Bible translator. A missionary translator must learn the gender system of the target language. How neutral his or her translation may be depends on the culture of the target language, which is likely to be a completely different ball game than the English discussion.

For example, the gender system of Japanese is quite different from that of English or koine Greek. Japanese and many other languages distinguish between younger and older, male and female siblings and cousins.

Again, there are other implications. In Japanese “She” (彼女, kanojo) can mean “girlfriend.” So if you say, "Is there a 'she'?" you are asking someone if they have a girlfriend. Further, “Son” (息子, musuko) can have a taboo meaning in some contexts, believe it or not!

Most Japanese titles (“Teacher,” “Professor,” “Pastor,” etc.) do not have gender. In fact, the normal words of respect for another do not have gender. For both men women you use San (さん), as in "John San," coming after the name. For a higher level of respect, you use Sama (様) for both men and women. But then for kids, the title is different for boys and girls: Kun (君) for boys and Chan (ちゃん) for girls.

Needless to say, getting the gender system wrong in a missionary Bible translation can not only crash the translation, but affect the missionary's whole ministry!

 

Haven't been able to post all week, since it was our Bible conference. However, Craig brought up a salient point when he asked if there was a need for a new Japanese version. What are the criteria for recognizing the need for a translation?

1. If there are no translations in a language, that is the greatest need possible! There are still around 3,000 languages and dialects without any books of the Bible translated. This is a huge need!

2. Archaic translation. If the only translation is seriously outdated, then a new translation is needed. In the 1950's a very flawed revision was made from the "Classical Japanese Bible," which in its turn was a revision of the "Original Bible." The new one was called the Kogoyaku (Colloquial Version).

3. This brings up another reason. If the existing translation is seriously flawed, a new one is needed. This is the case with the leading conservative Japanese version, the Shinkaiyaku (New Japanese Bible), which was needed due to the flaws of the Kogo translation.

4. If the only existing version is considered to be unacceptable (liberal, Catholic, overly free), then a new effort might be begun.

5. Copyright issues. The New Japanese Bible, funded by the Lockman Foundation, had huge copyright issues, so that it was/is very difficult to get permission to print it, use it in software, etc. However, this was only copying the Lockman Foundation policy for the NASB, which is hugely restrictive. In fact, the Lockman Foundation actually sued the Japanese translating team, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was decided that the Japanese translation team had to pay the Lockman Foundation many 1000s of dollars--to use their own translation!!

 

Concerning textual criticism, I apparently have a different view from most translators. The typical English Bible translation has copious notes about textual criticism in the footnotes. The problem is that textual criticism and translation theory are two very different disciplines. Just because someone is expert in one of those doesn't mean they are automatically expert in the other.

I've done a little bit of textual criticism myself (one essay published), and I can tell you it is very complicated. As for me, I say, leave it to the scholars of textual criticism. Choose your source text (TR, Byz/Maj., UBS 1st-4th rev., or whatever), then go with it. No need to burden yourself down with the huge task of textual criticism throughout your translation.

 

I mentioned the lawsuit of the Lockman Foundation (NASB) against the Japanese translators of the Japanese Shinkaiyaku version. Here is a link where you can read the actual lawsuit: Lockman Foundation, Plaintiff-appellant, v. Evangelical Alliance Mission; Evangelical Alliance Missionof Japan; Kenneth G. Mcvety, Defendants-appellees, 930 F.2d 764 (9th Cir. 1991)

It may not have gone to the Supreme Court as I said it did, but it went up the ladder to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, at a minimum.

So, our new Japanese version is copyrighted, true, but then released into the public domain with the stipulation that (1) it not be changed, and (2) it will not accrue monetary gain to the user.

 

As part of the skopos, the translator must decide what level of literalness to use. It is, of course, possible to be too literal, such as was true in the first Chinese Bible translation. The translator should not be so literal that the sentence in the target language does not make sense. As ground-breaking and important as Robert Morrison’s Chinese translation was, it was too literal, and soon had to be replaced. Chinese linguist Liang A-fa wrote that Dr. Morrison’s translation “is faithful to the letter,—faithful in the extreme” so that in places it was not even understandable. (A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book 1, Barbarians at the Gates, 226.)

Above all, the translation must adapt to the sentence order of the target language, rather than try to transfer the sentence order of the original language. If translating from English into a language with a similar order, SVO (subject, verb, object), some semblance of meaning can be maintained. Chinese has an SVO order like English, but not precisely the same, which is why Chinese speakers can learn English syntax easily but sometimes sound strange.

On the other hand, Japanese has an SOV order. Having the verb anywhere but last (though often with a particle after it) obscures the meaning.

 

Hebrew prepositions are still prepositional, though backwards (right to left). They can still be complicated, with 11 categories. Greek prepositions are quite complicated, taking up to three different meanings depending on the case of the object.

Prepositions are not always prepositions. That is, sometimes the same grammatical unit is postpositional. Japanese prepositional phrases are postpositional, and are likely come right before the verb at the end of the sentence.

 

Don't overthink it. In a language with postpositions, the "preposition" (pre + position) comes at the end of the phrase. For example, "I go to church" in Japanese is 私は教会に行く (Watashi wa kyokai ni iku), wherein "to church" is kyokai ni, literally, "church to." Thus, a postpositional particle meaning "to" comes after "church" in the syntax.

Here is a fairly good description: Prepositions and postpositions.

 

Think about the resources needed for a translator. A European language or the language of a people group which has had Christianity for many years might have resources for translation already in that language. However, they will be few. Japan has had evangelical missionaries and churches for over 150 years, but I only had two short Greek-Japanese lexicons when I taught Greek there, and the only textbook available for basic Greek most of the time when I taught was Machen, from 1923. (I understand there is now a new textbook now.) One year Machen was out of print, and I had to use a textbook hand-written by a Japanese pastor! However, there are abundant Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries to choose from.

The pioneer missionary translator, working with a people group with no written language, will have to write his own grammar and dictionary of the language! This is a very difficult task, taking many years. For a wonderful a account of such an effort, read In Search of the Source, by Neil Anderson with Hyatt Moore. Anderson, published by Wycliffe. My translation students love this book!

To continue, the missionary translator must have good resources in English, even if he must translate into an unwritten language. For lexicons, I especially recommend BAGD (ask me if you don't know what this is--I prefer this 2nd ed. over BDAG), Abbot-Smith, and the Analytical Lexicon of the Greek NT by Friberg, Friberg and Miller (more for the meanings than the analysis).