Bible Translation Research Articles

Bible Translation as Justice

The translation of the Bible into minority languages has the potential to affirm the dignity and worth of translating communities as people created in the image of God (imago dei). For my own people—the Ghomala’ of Cameroon—the use of the mother tongue was crucial for local acceptance of Christianity and identification as children of God. This article shows how biblical concepts of justice as both primary and restorative relate to the mission of God and the imago dei of all human beings. BIBLE TRANSLATION AS JUSTICE regards Bible translation as not just a pragmatic tool, but a fundamental issue of justice that enables people to have a right relationship with God and others. Minority language communities around the world bear witness to the potential for Bible translation to empower, transform, and contribute to a sense of value and confidence. As a result, Bible translation is not only a key to human flourishing but for Christians a way of following Jesus in his incarnation.

How Long Will You Love Being “Upright”? The Danger of False Friends in Translation

Working in related languages can be beneficial in that knowledge of one language can be applied to another without having to learn each one individually. Unfortunately, assumed equivalence often leads to mistakes and misunderstandings caused by false friends—often referred to as “false cognates”—that is, words that appear similar across language boundaries and are therefore assumed to have the same meaning. While the issue of false friends has been discussed with regards to language learning for decades, false friends are not always obvious and can single-handedly render translations inaccurate, unacceptable, or both. The goal of this paper is to apply insights from existing studies on false friends to translation among related languages and Bible translation in particular. To clarify the nature of the issue, relevant terminology is discussed alongside examples from Bible translation in South Asia. Finally, the paper proposes potential steps forward for Bible translation practitioners to avoid the potential pitfalls of false friends.

Перекладацькі стратегії та трансформації як можливість дослідження концепту святості у вибраних листах Софії Фредро-Шептицької до її сина Романа Шептицького (з польської, французької, англійської та латинської мов)

The article aims to analyse translation strategies and transformations on the material of the selected Polish-language letters by Sofia Fredro-Sheptytska to her son Roman Sheptytsky, which were not sent nor published during the author’s lifetime. Polish, French, English, and Latin are taken into account. Hidden quotations are compared with similar passages in different translations of the Bible. The possibilities of the Ukrainian language in the translation of spiritual letters are investigated. The work was carried out with manuscripts translated into Ukrainian, typed on a computer and commented on by church activists and their colleagues. Thanks to textological, translational, comparative, biblical and other forms of analysis, the spiritual portrait of the addressee – Roman Sheptytsky, as well as the addressee, his mother, was revealed.

Listening to the Other: Kuang’s Babel, Postcolonialism, and Bible Translation

Despite its influence in the broader academy, postcolonial thought has had minimal impact on the study of Bible translation. This article examines postcolonialism, drawing out common themes from the contested descriptions of the discipline, and briefly reviews some of the ways postcolonial thought has contributed to Missiology, Biblical Studies, and Translation Studies. It then explores the general lack of interaction between postcolonial criticism and studies of Bible translation and suggests ways that attending to postcolonial critiques could benefit the field. The article concludes with a case study using the history of Thai translations of the Bible to illustrate some of the benefits that could be brought to studies of Bible translation by an increased sensitivity to postcolonial thought.

Can Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry be “Unparalleled”?

This study of “parallelism” in biblical Hebrew poetry has been stimulated by the recent monograph on biblical poetry by Grosser (2023). After an initial overview of the book, I summarize some of the main challenges that I encountered when trying to process the essential aspects of Grosser’s novel Gestalt-based approach. Next, from my literary-structural perspective I consider a larger selection of poetic passages as examples to illustrate the salient differences in our analytical procedures and results. This comparative survey will hopefully stimulate others to take up further cognitive and stylistic explorations of this important topic which, though very well-known and documented by past and present expositions, is not without its lingering ambiguities and points of controversy, which at times significantly affect technical terminology as well as Bible interpretation and translation.

Parallelizing Bible texts: Developing the database of the Unified Bible Reader online application

The Unified Bible Reader (UBR), developed by the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, aims to facilitate the parallel reading of various Bible versions, including original language editions and antique as well as modern translations. This paper outlines the creation of a parallelized database of Bible texts through a four-step process: digitization, data cleaning, integration, and parallelization. The paper discusses the inherent challenges of the digitization phase which involves the conversion of non-digital texts to digital format, primarily using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Data cleaning focuses on correcting OCR errors and resolving format inconsistencies. Integration, that is, importing text into a unified database, addresses issues with rare cases of text division. Parallelization involves aligning textual units across different versions, accounting for variations in verse numbering and verse boundaries. The development of software tools enabled semi-automatic and manual alignment. The application may serve as a basis for more refined text splitting and the addition of annotations to support advanced textual analysis and translation comparisons. The UBR project marks a significant step towards comprehensive, accessible parallel Bible reading and analysis.

O evangelho de Mateus e a história da leitura em edições bíblicas brasileiras

ABSTRACT The gospel of Matthew is one of the most beloved and studied gospels in Christianity, having a rich history of reception. The purpose of this paper is to article study its reading in Brazil from selected intertitles in two biblical versions. The research aims to identify how the gospel has been received by Brazilian editors and readers and how editorial intertitles can provide evidence of such reception. In order to achieve such objective, the history of reading and the history of the book are used as references, based on theories by Roger Chartier (2001, 2002, 2022), Robert Darnton (2010), Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (2017), Gerard Genette (1997) and D.F. McKenzie (2018).

A Comparative Analysis of the Translator’s Identities of Robert Morrison and Yan Fu in Two Chinese Translations of the Bible

The Bible, as a classic work of Christianity, holds an important position in the world literary history, and its translation into Chinese has been a difficult and complicated process. This paper selects two Translators Robert Morrison and Yan Fu, as well as their Chinese translations of the Bible as the research objects. Through a comparative analysis of the cultural identities of these two translators, the paper elucidates the influence of different translator identities on their translation behavior. The study found that based on different cultural identities, Morrison and Yan Fu presented different emphases in terms of the text selection and different translation characteristics of the two Chinese translations of the Bible.

Intralingual translation, cultural accessibility and the ethics of translation: The Volxbibel as a case study

This article deals with the ethics of intralingual translation and cultural accessibility. Based on the analysis of five characteristic text examples of the Volxbibel, a German intralingual translation of the Bible which makes excessive use of local adaptive strategies and whose central aim is to make the Scriptures accessible to youngsters, it will be shown that cultural accessibility can only be achieved if the ethical dimension of semiotic translational transfer is taken duly into account. Methodologically, the analysis will be based on a contrastive pragmatic analysis of the Volxbibel and its canonical counterpart, the Lutherbibel. The results of the analysis reveal that ethically grounded intralingual translation can only be achieved when transfer actions are oriented, not only towards the translational skopos and the target-text, but, at the same time, respect the source-text author’s intention(s) and the source-text’s ideological and socio-cultural background. Finally, on the grounds of these results, a slight adjustment of Zethsen’s and Hill-Madsen’s criterial definition of translation is proposed, by explicitly integrating therein the ethical dimension. This would contribute to a more precise delineation of both intralingual and interlingual translation.

A Proposed Reading of Lachish Letter 4

Lachish Letter 4 is mostly legible and understandable, save one word, וידע, the punctuation and object of which are still controversial. Here, I suggest it should be read וְיָדַע and that its object is Šemaʻyāhū, a high-ranking army officer who came from Jerusalem to the Maresha Fortress in order to study Judah’s western defense lines. This proposition is supported by syntactical analogies with contemporaneous biblical verses. Thus interpreted, I propose that Lachish Letter 4 is not an alarming note on the fall of the Azekah Fortress, as some scholars argue, but a routine progress report on orders issued by the regional commander in Lachish.

Some Eco-Destructive Biblical Verses and Post-Colonial Fanaticism: Interpretations and Implications on Climate Change Action

Some Eco-Destructive Biblical Verses and Post-Colonial Fanaticism: Interpretations and Implications on Climate Change Action

The Persistent Effects of Bible Translations in Africa

The Persistent Effects of Bible Translations in Africa

Why Consider Local Genres in Translation?

A growing number of scholars and practitioners in Bible translation recognize the importance of considering local genres, although leading textbooks devote relatively little attention to this topic. In the meantime, many practitioners are unsure how to explore local genres effectively, while others doubt the value of doing so. This paper outlines a process for identifying and working with genres. Evidence both from the translation world and from other fields of study shows that genre awareness enhances translation quality, reception, and the translation process itself. The final section of the paper addresses potential challenges related to genre-level translations, providing suggestions for navigating the use of genres in different contexts.

The Literary Use of Names in Hebrew Narrative and Opportunities for Sign Language Translation

Names of characters in literature are frequently used as dense signifiers, conveying messages from author to reader beyond identifying an individual, and offering clues about the character’s destiny or how storylines may develop. This paper explores how the potential semantic connections evoked by names in Old Testament literature are exploited by Hebrew narrators as they craft their stories, contributing to characterization, plot structure, leitworter and dramatic irony. For example, Laban (‘white’) is caught up in trickery with white goats and white sticks, whereas Micah (‘who is like Yahweh’) has an idol in his house. Bible translators working with spoken languages tend to transliterate (rather than translate) these names, relegating any semantic connections to a footnote. Sign languages, however, are more iconic and often naturally use name signs that evoke something about the referent, rather than just an arbitrary collection of sounds. This opens up the possibility of maintaining some of the semantic connections and literary features of Hebrew narratives when creating Scripture-based products in sign languages. This paper investigates the opportunities and limitations of such a strategy for translating biblical names.

On the Nature of Poetry, Parallelism, and Methods: A Response to Ernst Wendland

This article is a response to Ernst Wendland’s article—also in this issue of Journal of Translation—which interacts with my cognitive approach to biblical Hebrew poetry, especially my recent monograph, Unparalleled Poetry (2023). In this article, I set my work within the broader context of biblical poetry studies and explain how it draws from literary and cognitive research to provide a robust framework for the concept of the poetic line—a contribution to not only biblical studies, but also broader poetry studies. The poetic line gets to the heart of the nature of poetry: the line is central to not just poetic structure (up to the level of the whole poem), but also poetry’s potential for rhythm and effects and construction of meaning. My view of the centrality of the line affects how I address various issues related to parallelism. I close by discussing the role and limits of method in regard to both poetic lineation and reading of poems.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF BIBLICAL TRANSLATION – INTO GREEK AND INTO SYRIAC, 3RD CENT. BCE – 7TH CENT. CE

A THOUSAND YEARS OF BIBLICAL TRANSLATION – INTO GREEK AND INTO SYRIAC, 3RD CENT. BCE – 7TH CENT. CE

1920년대 조선야소교서회의 교양서적 번역이 기행문학에 미친 영향

This paper examines the trends and meanings of translation and publication of cultural books by the JoseonYasogyoseohoi(The Christian Literature Society of Korea) during the Japanese colonial period, and Ann Judson Sajeok(Ann Judson), Yurakhwangdogi(The Swiss Family Robinson) and GeurusoPhyorugi(Robinson Crusoe), which are adventure stories for missionary purposes. The goal is to identify the internal structure of and its influence on the development of travel literature. 
 As a personal biography of a great man, Ann Judson and the drift novels Yurakhwangdogi and GeurusoPhyorugi, although their genres are different, have something in common in terms of travel experience, drifting, and cross-cultural contact. This means that these works contributed greatly to the development of Korean travel literature, but there are certain differences in the internal structure of the works depending on the differences in genre. Due to the nature of biographies of great people, Ann Judson has a relatively simple narrative structure in which the flow of time and movement through space are relatively simple. In comparison, other two drifted novels are works that appropriately embody the motif of ‘travel → drifting → settlement → return’, and are works that appropriately reproduce the chronotope as a space-time complex at the level of travel literature. In particular, the illustrations used in Geuruso are pictures that specifically express the time and space signified within the text, and become noteworthy elements in relation to the restructuring of space and time in travel literature. In this way, adventure stories for missionary purposes can be said to be important works in terms of the development of travel literature, even if Bible translations remain or cultural prejudices based on civilizational discourse are inherent.

Nemeshegyi Péter SJ mint a Szentírás magyarázója

Péter Nemeshegyi SJ Interpreter of the Scripture. The one hundredth birthday of Péter Nemeshegyi SJ was celebrated with a conference by members of the Hungarian Jesuit order on 25 March 2023. On this occasion, I was asked to appraise this excellent theologian as the interpreter of the Bible. One of Father Nemeshegyi’s most important foreign mission assignments during the decades he spent in Japan was his work in the Japanese ecumenical Bible translation. His experience and impressions during this work provide encouragement and guidance to those involved in a similar enterprise in Hungary. Péter Nemeshegyi was a true Catholic interpreter of the Bible, who believed that the Biblical tradition of the church brings parts of the Holy Scriptures that seem contradictory or difficult to a higher level of synthesis. His favourite hermeneutical starting point was the assumption of God’s goodness in every interpretation of the Scriptures, as well as the Christological principle, which he may have adopted from St Augustine. He taught about the Bible very effectively and creatively in various cultural environments (such as Japan or other East Asian countries) because he always found the fitting inculturation aspects of the Gospel and used them in both his teaching and application. Keywords: Nemeshegyi, biblical interpretation, inculturation, Jesuits, foreign mission, Bible translation

Lexicographical and phraseological addenda to the existing Crimean Karaim dictionaries

This article focuses on presenting lexicographical and phraseological addenda to two well-known Crimean Karaim dictionaries by examining the Book of Numbers from a printed Crimean Karaim Bible translation published in Eupatoria in 1841. The presentation of these lexical items and expressions highlights the importance of exploring newly available transcriptions to uncover previously unlisted dictionary entries, thereby enriching the documentation of the extinct Crimean Karaim language.

Pre-Reformation and Reformation Influences on the Development of European Literary Languages

The pre-Reformation and Reformation social and religious movements contributed to the development of biblical and religious as well as journalistic and polemical writings, which had a significantly positive impact on the increase in functional efficiency and standardisation of European languages. Translations of The Bible played a special role in the development of European languages as texts with the highest linguistic prestige. Not only did Luther’s Bible (1522–1534) contribute to the unification of German literary language, but its 16th-century translations had an outstanding influence on the development of Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, i.e. Danish, Swedish and Icelandic. The language of Protestant translations of The Bible was regarded in the 16th–17th centuries in France and England as a model of stylistic excellence. Prior to the 16th century, there were fairly rich Celtic writings (Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish), but they were undoubtedly greatly enriched between the second half of the 16th century and the first quarter of the 19th century by Protestant translations of The Bible and other religious texts. The translation work by the Czech brothers (ideological supporters of the Reformation) – Blahoslav’s New Testament (1564) and the Kralice Bible (1579–1593) – is a symbol of the linguistic prowess of the 16th-century Czech language as well as the basis for its rebirth in the 19th century. The linguistic consciousness of the Slovaks was long influenced by the Kralice Bible. Hungarian and Polish Reformation translations of The Bible enriched the history of these languages considerably. A number of European languages owe their actual literary beginnings to the Reformation: Finnish and Estonian (Finnish languages), Latvian and Lithuanian (Baltic languages), Upper Lusatian, Lower Lusatian and Slovene (Slavonic languages). In Croatia, prints financed by Reformation supporters appeared in the 16th century. The Serbian Orthodox New Testament (1847) by Karadžić and The Old Testament (1868) by Daničić were published by the Protestant publishing house of the British Bible Society in London, which also published a translation of the Bulgarian Catholic Slaveykov Bible (1871).