This first issue of 2020 contains a wide range of offerings on translation and language and their intersection with biblical text. They consist of one practical paper, two on language and cognitive issues, and four focused on biblical text.
The second part of David Clark’s review of vocative usage through the Gospels covers the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. As in the first part of this investigation, Clark examines Jesus’ own use of vocatives towards God and other people as well as vocatives used when others address Jesus. Clark not only discusses the vocative usage within the Gospel contexts but raises questions about how these can be rendered into contemporary languages.
Anicia del Corro reflects on the success of the Pinoy version of the Bible in the Philippines. Pinoy, in widespread use in popular society, is a mixed or macaronic language in which a basic framework of Tagalog is modified by the use of English forms at a lexical, morphological, and sometimes grammatical level. Despite challenges to the status of such a language, and its appropriateness for rendering biblical text, del Corro shows that this translation meets the criteria for representing the source text, and that it addresses a definite need in the Filipino community. Dan Shaw and his collaborators draw on a wide range of real-world experience in culture and language in order to discuss a number of cognitive issues relating to the translation of biblical text. These require the translator to think through a complex grid of societal types and cultural schema.
Peter Schmidt brings a narrow focus with potentially wider import. In Num 18.1 he argues that mention of Aaron’s “father’s house” (בֵּית־אָבִיךָ) refers not to Aaron’s “ancestral house” (NRSV)—the Levite clan—but rather to the house of which Aaron himself is the father—the priests alone. Suzanna Millar takes a functionalist approach to the translation of proverbs, arguing that although “openness” is an important feature of the proverb genre, it is not static, but part of a process. Translations therefore should be prepared to move along a trajectory from “openness” to “closure” of meaning, with accompanying “transformation” for the new audience, which may move the proverb away from linguistic correspondence to the Hebrew, but is at the same time more faithful to the genre itself. Izaak de Hulster takes us into the world of the Song of Songs and its allusive imagery, in the first installment of a two-part article. Examining the way in which the imagery of poetry—and this poem in particular—works, he explores the difficulties and possibilities in translation, and proposes a pleonastic approach where the imagery is retained but synonymous expressions are added to clarify its significance.
Richard Moore takes us back to the New Testament, and to some familiar ground, examining the use of the δικαι- family of words in Romans and Galatians. He argues for the relational view that was prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century (suggesting translations drawn largely from one English word-family) and against the reversion to more forensic views of Paul’s theology evidenced in the trend to more formal translations in the twenty-first century.
There follows a review by Phil Stine of the publication by John Benjamins in 2019 of The World Atlas of Translation (Gambier and Stecconi, eds.). Stine provides a summary of the various chapters and examines the content from the perspective of its interest to Bible translation.
The issue concludes with our annual listing of publications related to the United Bible Societies which are available for translators.
Stephen Pattemore
