Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George F Somsel <gfsomsel AT juno.com>]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 21:16:43 -0500 "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
writes:
> Peter:
> 
> When I hear "direct translation", most people are thinking of a word 
> for word translation. For reasons discussed before, that is 
> impossible.
> 
> But the question is: how much paraphrasing can be done before it 
> crosses the line from merely making the ideas in one language 
> understandable in another, as a subset of translation, to becoming 
> an original work of art pushing its own ideas? All of us have seen 
> examples of such misuse of paraphrase, where it has become the boss 
> rather than the servant of translation, hence why we are so leery of 
> "paraphrase".
> 
> Karl W. Randolph.
_____________

Karl,

Your "direct translation" is what is generally called "formal
equivalence."  I too tend to favor that approach.  I would suppose that a
translation which claims to derive from the original language texts but
which tends to simply reword an existing translation would be called a
paraphrase, but a translation derived from the original language texts
but which does not faithfully represent those texts would simply be a
poor translation.  This is not to say that one must restrict his language
to the glosses supplied in the lexica.  I frequently make use of a
thesaurus to find an acceptable synonym which I feel most accurately
conveys the thought of the original or which is more comprehensible to
today's readers.

george
gfsomsel
___________