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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Robert Alter on Translation

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>
  • To: CS Bartholomew <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>
  • Cc: hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Robert Alter on Translation
  • Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 05:27:00 -0700

On 13/08/2003 23:36, CS Bartholomew wrote:

Was reading Robert Alter's "To The Reader" in "Genesis" (Norton 1996) and
found some of his comments eyebrow raising.

For example, he advocates rendering a repititous Hebrew word with a
repititous English equivalent. He firmly denounces altering the English
equivalent based on contextual considerations.

At first glance this sounds like concordant translation.

Has translation theory come full circle while I was napping?

No, Clay. If anyone has been napping it has been Alter and friends who have ignored or rejected the last 50 years of advance in translation and communication theory. Alter is following an old, I would say outdated although still popular in some circles, theory of translation, originating with Schleiermacher, by which the translator's job is to do as little as possible so that the translation is as far as possible in the forms of the original language, although using words which appear in dictionaries of the target language (though not necessarily using those words according to the definitions in those dictionaries!) This is fine if you know the source language, as Alter does and indeed all translators do. But any translator who even thinks about their target audience will realise that in general they do not know the source language. That means that they do not understand well texts written with the syntactic and semantic structures of the source language. Otherwise they wouldn't need the translation. So the result of this technique is a translation which is satisfying to the translators, both theoretically and because it is much easier to translate in this sort of mechanical way. But it totally fails to communicate the intended message to its target audience.

See also my paper "Holy Communicative", which is still at http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/Bible%20Translation/BT_main.htm.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/






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