Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT ozemail.com.au> =====
>Your "Ich bin ein Berliner" example doesn't quite work because there is
>an obvious emendation which should be made in a translation. But suppose
>you were translating an modern English text into some other language and
>came across the words "I am a jelly donut". What would you do? You might
>conclude that the text you are translating is corrupt because the writer
>could not possibly have meant that, perhaps there was a problem in the
>scanning and OCR software. But there is no obvious emendation - at least
>if you don't know about the German ambiguity and Kennedy's speech.

Ah, but now you're adding a new dimension to the situation. If it were an 
English text, and I were reasonably certain that it wasn't already a 
translation from something else, the German issue would be completely absent 
from the picture. True, if I were aware of Kennedy's speech and the issue 
there, I might make a connection to what's going on in this English text. 
Maybe the author was making a play on the German scenario, in which case, my 
guess would be correct. Or maybe there is no relationship at all, and the 
author had something else in mind. But at this point, it's really an issue of 
intertextual analysis, not translation or lower textual criticism. The point 
of the illustration was that the original scenario (Kennedy's speech) calls 
upon the translator's knowledge of German to identify and deal with the 
error. 
This is a reasonable part of the translator's task. But there is nothing I 
can 
think of in English that would produce the error: "I am a jelly donut." So as 
a translator, I would not approach the scenario you suggest in the same way.

My point is this: When we read, if we read well, we pick up easily on various 
types of mistakes and corruptions. I had no problem reading and understanding 
Davies's In Search of 'Ancient Israel,' even though it's one of the worst 
modern editing jobs I've ever seen in print. Whenever I came to a misspelling 
or other editing problem, I could easily see what the text ought to have said 
and understand it on that basis. I didn't wrestle with trying to make sense 
of 
the text as I found it, because I accepted that it had mistakes. I have a 
friend who seems to have some sort of gap between his brain and mouth that 
produces a lot of meaning one thing and saying another. Sometimes I correct 
him as he goes along, but normally I just take the slips in stride and 
ascertain his meaning without difficulty. We do this sort of thing all the 
time in our native language. The process may be a bit more rigorous in a 
foreign language, but it can still be applied. Much of textual criticism is 
simply learning to recognize these mistakes in Hebrew or whatever other 
language and to ascertain what should have been written based on what we know 
of how the language normally works. Now, the negative example is the 
spell-checker on MS-Word, which often fails to recognize a technical term or 
personal name and suggests an alternate reading. This sort of thing warns us 
against making the process too mechanical or automatic, and the need to be 
sensitive to idiosyncracies. Of course, we are not all-knowing as scholars, 
but then neither is the native speaker, yet somehow we all strike a balance 
between the impulse to correct apparent mistakes and appropriate caution 
regarding the unfamiliar.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics