Featured Translating grammatical forms

That's rich. Instead of answering my original objection to your original rendering, you change the rendering and act as if nothing happened.

Your original rendering in post #28:

Now you're saying,

 

Great article, Jon. Thanks for linking to it. If it weren't for P75, the eclectics wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

 

Sure, I agree with your second translation. And I deny that the two say the same thing.

 

I think Van rests happily in his contradictions. :smilewinkgrin:

 

Um, I don't think you are understanding the difference between syntax and semantics here. You're mixing them up. My statement was strictly about syntax. Lexical units without syntax are contextually meaningless.

 

And I have said that it does. :type:

This is too general a statement, too hard to quantify. The answer depends on the target language and what transformations are necessary to produce syntactically correct sentences as compared to the original.

Yes, I agree, because it proves my point that grammatical forms carry meaning.

I disagree.

What? :laugh: "Believe in syntax"???? That's a very strange statement. Syntax exists and the translator must deal with it. Period. It is impossible for the translator to translate if he doesn't "believe in syntax." There is no "believe," there is merely "translate."

This brings me to ask, do you know what syntax is?

 

This view is called reader response theory or reader response criticism, and is the lynchpin of dynamic equivalence. I disagree wholeheartedly with it, since there is no way to know how the 1st century readers responded. I translate synax and semantics, not in view of imagined responses.

 

DE translators may do that sometimes, but that is not taught in the books about DE by Nida and others.

 

I've been waiting for someone to ask me in regards to the OP, what if the target language doesn't have a passive form? A scholar friend wrote me and said that the Coptic language has no passive form. It's even more complicated than that, because in Japanese the passive form is not completely equivalent to the Greek passive. For example, there is an honorific use to the Japanese passive.

Let me say here that the universal grammar theory of linguistics is relevant. Here is a definition: "universal grammar Traditionally of any system of grammatical categories, structures, rules, etc. seen as common to all languages. Thus one in which, e.g., all languages distinguish nouns and verbs, or all languages have rules for anaphora" (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, by P. H. Matthews, 421).

Here is an older (1967) definition: “universal grammar: The study of languages in general, and the general principles basic to the grammatical phenomena of all languages, without confining itself to any particular language” (Dictionary of Linguistics, by Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor, 224).

Therefore, translation of grammatical form is possible. The target language may not have a certain form that the original has, but it will have a way to express the meaning of the grammatical form of the original.

When I say that form has meaning, I am talking about individual grammatical forms, not sentence order. The sentence order of a language will have significance in the form of nuance or style in that particular language, but such significance is usually non-transferable. On the other hand, generally speaking grammatical forms (noun, pronoun, active, passive, etc.) will have equivalents in the target language.

When this is not so, as in the Greek infinitive which has not parallel in Japanese, I look for the form in the target language which fulfills the same function and conveys the same meaning. In Japanese this may be a present verb followed by the word "koto" (行くこと = "to go") or what is called the "te form" of the verb (行って= "to go"). Simply because there is no parallel sentence structure from language to language does not mean that there are no grammatical equivalents.

 

Biblical justification for a theory of universal grammar:

1. We are made in God's image, and He communicates clearly with Mankind, indicating that we also can communicate clearly with one another.

2. Adam and Eve communicated with each other with language. Since they are the first ancestors, and all humans came from them, it follows that we all have the same capability to learn languages and communicate with them.

3. The same argument can be made from the history of Noah and his wife and family.

4. At the time of the tower of Babel, all people spoke the same language. God confused the languages at that time, meaning He gave new languages to various groups of individuals. This is borne out by the modern language families said to each come from a common ancestor, such as the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, etc. (Note: Interestingly enough, Japanese is said to have no similar languages and is part of no language family, meaning it is probable that it may have been settled directly by people from Babel.)

5. At Pentecost, although the languages were miraculously given, they were clearly extant languages, and clear communication took place, including the Word of God. Truth was transported across the language barriers.

The implication for translation of the universal grammar theory are that there must be optimally equivalent grammatical and lexical units from language to language. Translation is not only possible, it is eminently so.