Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Peter Kirk wrote:-

> 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 Alter is following an old, I would say outdated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.

As a rank-and-file church-goer with no special responsibilities I see
``translations'' going further and further away from the original texts.
We now have the situation when originality of expression in the target
language is valued over faithfulness to the original.  There are
``translations'' on the market which are paraphrases but are labelled
``translations'' purely for marketing purposes. A person who reads a DE
translation or a paraphrase trusts the translator(s)/paraphraser(s) to
have understood the text and correctly rendered in into English. But they
ought to do that knowing full well they have abicated a significant
portion of their responsibility to understand the text to someone else.
What you have today are many Bible versions which are striving to
differentiate themselves from others on the market and often overtly
slanted to a particular theological persuasion. A purchaser has the right
to know what they're buying. But some Bible publishers are deliberately
misleading purchasers as to what they're getting. If Alter stands up
against it, I say Amen!

I bet Alter has give more thought to these matters than most and I think
you've taken some cheap shots at him. Such as "But any translator who even
thinks about their target audience will realise that in general they do
not know the source language." Yeah, right, sure, cheap shot Peter.

And how about this gem:-

> But it totally fails to communicate the intended message to its
> target audience.

Perhaps you ought to stop and think why the KJV is still quite popular.
The KJV brought a lot of Hebrew idiom and even word order in to the
English language. It did not and does not totally fail to communicate.
Quite the opposite, it was a shaper of the English Language.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_
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