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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 14:37:02 -0700

On 14/08/2003 14:09, CS Bartholomew wrote:

Jan-Wim,

Haven't actually read Alter's translation yet, but I suspect that he does
not apply this principle woodenly. A local recognition of the significance
of repeated terms which serve a literary purpose, sounds like a good plan.
How local is local? This might end up being a sticky problem. One might
discover a term which is repeated throughout the Pentateuch which serves a
literary purpose but if the contextual meaning of this term makes concordant
translation counter productive semantically, the trade off between the
meaning and the literary structure is going to cause heart burn for a lot of
SIL people.
The problem here is that repetition means different things to different target audiences, largely but not entirely dependent on language. It had a certain purpose in Hebrew which Alter no doubt describes. But when read, for example, in a particular language of central Asia (and to some extent in English) it is a mark of very poor style and an ignorant author who doesn't know the language well enough to use a variety of synonyms. Do we want our translations to communicate that message?

However, SIL people are not in the same world as Robert Alter. His target
audience is not tribal cultures getting the bible for the first time. Alter
is translating for a highly literate audience which has had the bible for
eons in their own language. So target audience is a big issue here. Just
because I like Everett Fox's "Five Books of Moses" does not mean that I
would give a copy to someone who just arrived from Cambodia.

Good point. Just as long as Alter's translation is targeted at this particular subset of the English reading population and not marketed, as so many Bible versions are, as the best translation for all English readers.


Note also that the pressure on the translator to translate one and the same
word in Hebrew with different words in the target language becomes
especially heavy in cases of intertextual connection, where it is often
characteristic of the words in question that they do not fit very well in
their present context ...


Yes, ambiguity in the original can produce incomprehensible text in a
translation if one carries Alter's suggestions to extremes. But not even a
Berkley processor is going to do that, is he?

I guess you meant a Berkley professor, who is as likely to be she as he. But if by a Berkley processor you mean a computer programmed by the clever Berkley people, although that would be it, yes it would do that. :-( This isn't just a joke, there are people really trying to do machine translation of the Bible, but one of the main problems they come up against is that computers are mindlessly consistent!

Maybe we should in cases such as the first one take for granted that the
English translation sounds unusual, if only because the choice of words in
the Hebrew is unexpected also. But in cases like the last one it seems
impossible to render the allusion in English in any meaningful way. I would
hesitate to translate the same Hebrew with the same English word in every
case, but it should certainly be done in every case where it can serve to
express literary features of the original.


There are some folks on this list which might not be willing to go this far.

Absolutely not! I would never agree that a translation should be made to express literary features of the original if it is then an inaccurate or meaningless translation. But I would accept a modified version (though omitting "certainly"): "it should... be done in every case where it can serve to express literary features of the original" *without compromising the accuracy and clarity of the translation*.


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






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