I imagine translating from some language into English, and the original text has to do with a bunch of people sitting around a room admiring a fancy new door. The obvious translation of what happens next is, “the host showed his guests the door.”
- The problem, though, is that “show the door” in English means “ask to leave.” Is “showed his guests the door” still the right translation?
- Equally, in England, to “table a motion” at a meeting means to decide to vote on it, while in the U.S. those same words mean to decide not to vote on it. If a British essay says, “he wanted to table to the motion,” is that how an American translation should read?
- In Japan, the word for “yes” is sometimes to used in polite situations to mean “no.” In these situations, should the translator render the Japanese hai (“yes”) as “yes” or as “no” in English?
- In Arabic, ahalan comes from the word for “family,” but it means “welcome.” Does the English rendition of that Arabic word have to include the word “family”?
- In China, the “dragon” is a symbol of beneficent, graceful, royal power. If a Chinese story says that, “her grandfather was always the dragon in her life,” should the English translation use the word “dragon,” even though “dragon” in English conveys a whole different set of images?
These cases are all examples of how the right word can convey the wrong thing, sometimes because English has a specific meaning for what could be a general phrase (1); sometimes because both the foreign language and English have specific meanings, and they don’t match (2); sometimes because the meaning of the foreign word changes depending on context in ways that the English word doesn’t (3); sometimes because the foreign language assigns imagery to a word but English doesn’t (4); and sometimes because the foreign language assigns imagery to a word but English has different imagery (5).
What these have in common is that they all strike me as cases where the English translation must avoid the literal words of the foreign language.
Similar cases in Bible translation keep popping up:
- Most recently, regarding the translation of the Greek for “son” in Arabic, because Arabic might use the word “son” for different imagery than Greek did.
- Regarding “heart” in Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27 (levav and kardia), because the Hebrew and Greek words conveyed different things than the English does.
- Regarding shepherds, and, in particular Psalm 23, because in Hebrew shepherds were fierce, regal, and romantic, while the same is not true in English.
among many others.
The more general lesson, it seems to me, is that translating the words can mean mistranslating the text.
Comments?
February 20, 2012
Posted by Joel H. |
translation theory | Bible, Bible translation, imagery, metaphor, translation |
10 Comments
It’s often pointed out that actually knowing more than one language is helpful for intuiting how translation works. But I think many of the same intuitions can come from thinking about just one language. Here are two examples from English:
1. Jim West recently wrote that “Bob Cargill has penned” something. What role does “pen” play in that phrase? In a language that can’t make nouns into verbs the way English does, should the translation be the equivalent of “wrote with a pen” or just “wrote”? What about “dialed [a phone]“? What about “top of the hour” for a society that has no physical clocks (or just digital ones!)?
Jim qualified his opening line: “Bob Cargill has penned (I know, its an anachronism since he typed and didnt pen at all)….” In that broader context, is “pen” a crucial element of the phrase that needs to be translated?
2. “Sofa” and “couch” mean almost exactly the same thing. But a “couch potato” isn’t a “sofa potato.” (For non-English speakers: A “couch potato” is someone who’s lazy, especially someone who lazes on a couch or sofa, and especially someone who does so to watch television.) What goes wrong if “sofa” and “couch” get mixed up? How can we know when the two words are interchangeable and when they’re not?
November 15, 2009
Posted by Joel H. |
general linguistics, translation theory | Bible, Bible translation, imagery, metaphor, translation |
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Last week I suggested that imagery can be subjective, varying from culture to culture.
Here’s another example.
In antiquity, for a person to be “fat” was a good thing, the word essentially representing the opposite of “scrawny.”
Every day, modern America produces something like twice the calories that its population needs to thrive, so many Americans face an unprecedented struggle: they take in too many calories for their own good. In ancient Israel, however, people struggled to get enough calories, and only the fortunate succeeded.
This creates a translation dilemma, because calling someone “fat” nowadays is an insult, not a complement as it used to be.
Here are some examples of how “fat” and its how it’s handled in translation:
In Job 36:16, the table “full of fatness” (KJV, ESV, NRSV), is what the NIV calls “choice food.”
The point of Psalm 22:30 is that the healthy and the ill alike should praise God. But the KJV, “All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship…” juxtaposed with “all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him” hardly does the trick. (I assume that “they that go down to the dust” are “sick people.”) The NAB assumes that the Hebrew dishnei (“fat of”) should be yishnei (“sleepers of”), so the first part is “All who sleep in the earth…”; the NAB then adds the note, “Hebrew unclear.” I think the Hebrew is clear once we recognize that “fat” was a sign of health.
The very well known Psalm 23 uses the verbal form of “fat” (dishanta — “you fattened [my head with oil]“) for what is commonly translated “anointed.” The Hebrew thus forms a connection between “anointed” and “cup overflows” that is lacking in English.
Psalm 36:9 describes the benefits of the Temple as “fatness of your house” (KJV), but even the ESV (with the NRSV) turns this into “abundance.”
Psalm 63:6 mentions “fat and rich food” (ESV), which is better than the KJV’s “marrow and fatness.” The NIV offers, “richest of foods.” (The NAB’s poetic, “rich banquet of praise” is nice, but I don’t understand where it comes from.)
The image in Psalm 65:12 of the earth’s bounty is of paths (or perhaps carts) that “drop fatness” (KJV), or — as emended by the ESV, NIV, and NRSV — “overflow with abundance.”
Proverbs 11:25 describes a reward for people who offer (or who are) a blessing. They will be “made fat” (KJV), or “enriched” (NIV, ESV, NRSV).
Proverbs 13:4 is even clearer. While the lazy person “gets nothing,” the diligent one is “made fat” (KJV), or “richly supplied” (ESV), “amply satisfied” (NAB), “fully satisfied” (NIV) or “richly satisfied” (NRSV).
Only the KJV translates “fat” consistently, but in so doing it makes the passages all but impossible to understand. The other translations do a better job of giving the modern reader a sense of what the text meant, but at the expense of the unifying image.
September 13, 2009
Posted by Joel H. |
Bible versions, translation practice, translation theory | Bible, deshen, fat, imagery, KJV, NAB, NIV, NRSV, Psalms, translation |
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In response to my recent post about idioms, and, in particular, the translation “lifted up his eyes,” Bob MacDonald suggests that “Eyes lifted up or eyes downcast are both indicative of the mood of the subject. They seem to me to be inherently material and literal in a good way.”
Whether or not that makes “lifted up his eyes” a good translation, his comment highlights another important issue for translation: Imagery is subjective.
For me, “downcast eyes” are a sign of sorrow. In parts of South America, “downcast eyes” are a sign of respect.
I’m pretty sure it would be a mistake to impose our modern cultural notions on the Bible, so we shouldn’t assume that its authors used imagery exactly the same way we do. But what is a translator to do when the most natural translation of the imagery gives the wrong impression?
September 11, 2009
Posted by Joel H. |
translation theory | Bible, imagery, translation |
5 Comments
From AGS
