The Bible Translator

This article is about oral Bible translation (OBT), its key features, and how it differs from both written Bible translation and oral Bible storying. The author draws on her own experience as a Translation Advisor on an OBT team, and also from interaction with other OBT teams around the world. The article proposes that internalisation is the key component or “ingredient” in OBT, and also discusses emotional exegesis and voice prosody as essential features of the oral translation process. Ideas are offered on how consultant checking of OBT differs from that of written Bible translation. The article ends by recommending intensive training on internalisation for all Bible translation teams, the development of notes on emotional exegesis and performance, and increased training for translation consultants on orality.

Oral Bible Stories (OBS) are retellings of stories that occur in the Bible. They create a bridge between the world of the Bible and the world of the receptor language, incorporating, excluding, and changing parts of stories as found in the Bible by their very design. Our first encounters as consultants with these stories left us wondering about the borders: What sort of changes are to be avoided and what sort are beneficial? Taking as a starting point the case study of an OBS consultant-check of a language in the Caucasus, this paper presents guidelines for omissions and additions.

This paper is concerned with the mistranslation of the Greek word καταγγέλλετε katangellete “you proclaim” in 1 Cor 11.26 in the first major Protestant translation of the Bible into Vietnamese, a problem that has continued to be reproduced in subsequent translations. The paper identifies the problem and discusses the importance of context in distinguishing the Greek second-person plural present active indicative and imperative forms. A solution to this historical translation problem is also suggested, involving the use of a particle indicating progressive aspect.

As discoveries are made, new words are needed to capture and describe the various new realities. These new words and ideas need to be either translated or transliterated into other languages for the benefit of the users of those languages. Consequently, strategies used successfully for previous translations and transliterations need to be studied, understood, and defined in order to maintain consistency in subsequent translations. It is from this perspective that this work seeks to unveil the translation and transliteration strategies employed in expressing the names of the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible in Igbo and Yoruba. Drawing on the data sourced from Igbo and Yoruba Bibles, this study shows that literal translation, direct translations, and borrowing were used. The borrowed words were adapted into the two indigenous languages using sound substitution, sound insertion, or approximation of Igbo/Yoruba phonetic symbols to English orthography.

The Gospel of Luke (7.1-10; par. Matt 8.5-13) relates a tale wherein Jesus heals a military officer’s slave at a distance. The slave remains in the background throughout the pericope, never speaking, much less appearing at all. Luke offers little information about this slave aside from his illness and the fact that he was ἔντιμος to the centurion (7.2). This word ἔντιμος has generally been construed as denoting the slave’s emotional or personal value to the centurion, most commonly as “dear.” This article argues that there is little lexical support for such a rendering. I will attempt to address the lacuna around the word ἔντιμος and its rendering in English translations, attending especially to epigraphic evidence for the term’s use. In short, I will argue that rather than denoting emotional importance, the term ἔντιμος designates the respect for the slave within the centurion’s household.

“Peace with you” in John 20 is widely understood as a Jewish greeting. But the context surrounding the Johannine peace salutation seems to suggest that it may have been meant to serve functions other than a greeting. These functional possibilities reflect the comprehensiveness of the meaning of peace in both the Old and New Testaments. A formal or word-for-word translation of “peace be with you” in a language like Tagalog ends up sounding artificial and unintelligible. Translation solutions are proposed for the different contexts in which the phrase occurs in John.

This article argues that Eph 5.33b should be understood as “so that the wife may respect her husband” and that translations should reflect this understanding in ways appropriate to the target language. In English translations, φοβῆται “may respect,” though subjunctive in form, is typically rendered as a command in function, thus giving the wife a unilateral instruction instead of expressing a probable result of the prior command for husbands to love their wives. For English translations, Eph 5.33b should be translated as a dependent result clause, with ἵνα “so that” expressed rather than omitted from translation, and with the subjunctive form φοβῆται “may respect” translated as subjunctive in function.

Rev 21.3b is a conundrum for translation. The text-critical data point to the UBS5 reading as original but copyists and translators have struggled with the awkwardness of the text. This article reviews translations of Rev 21.3b and the text-critical data and suggests that the translation “and ‘God-with-them’ himself will be their God” resolves the problem and is consistent with the UBS5 reading. This translation finds corroboration in other characteristics of the Apocalypse.

The Old Polish New Testament apocrypha are the most extensive written records of a Polish medieval religious language. The aim of this article is to analyze ways in which excerpts from the Psalms operate in these texts. No full Polish medieval translation of the Bible has been preserved, so it is the apocrypha that shape our understanding of the folk Bible in medieval Poland. Medieval authors came up with different translation strategies: formal and dynamic equivalence, as well as paraphrase and summary. The authors used the Latin text freely, adapting it to the subject, removing inconvenient passages and adding others. However, fragments of psalms are almost always translated accurately, word for word, duly accounting for the Latin word order. The manner of translating psalms is different from the way Old Polish authors translated texts they knew as bilinguals.

Until the seventeenth century, no Portuguese person or any other individual had either planned or accomplished a full translation of the Bible into Portuguese. As research has shown, there is a significant quantity of partial Bible texts in Portuguese during the late medieval period, but it was João Ferreira de Almeida (ca. 1628–1691) who undertook the “first common translation … of the Sacred Books.” Since the mid-eighteenth century, the “Almeida Bible” has been published in different versions, first in the Far East—Java and India—and, from the early nineteenth century, in Europe and America. This paper focuses on the historical context in which the Bible translation undertaken by João Ferreira de Almeida emerged and the main characteristics of the translation. It also provides a historical analysis of the revisions that the initial texts underwent in their different chronological and geographical environments, and ends with suggestions for a new revision of the European Portuguese version of the Almeida Bible.