Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

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 Alter is following an old, I would say outdated 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/