Mike Aubrey September 20, 2007 Language, Linguistics, Translation

Fun with grammatical analysis; Or a plea for Meaning-based translation

Consider the following two sentences:

Dana eu bahu leia.
Dana eu bahu na laia.

This is a language is from Amele in Papua New Guinea.

What do theses sentences mean? Here they are again with word by word glosses.

Dana eu bahu leia.
man that bush went [past]
Dana eu bahu na leia.
man that bush to went [past]

Do these sentences mean the same thing? Not a chance. They look similar, but say very different things.

An idiomatic translation of these two sentences in the same order would be:

That man went to live in the forest.
That man went to the toilet.

All of that because of the word /na/ to denote location.

In my couple posts a while back, I said that it often seems as if “literal” means awkward. But in this case, “literal” means misleading. Even the smallest elements can change the propositional content of a sentence.

So why is literal better for translating the Bible into English?

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1

Brian on September 20, 2007 at 6:33 pm
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I am slowly learning that in fact literal is not always better for the reasons you listed – it leads to awkward and potentially misleading renderings. I had a friend in college who preferred a more literal text such as the NAS because he wanted to be free to wrestle with the meaning of the text on his own instead of trusting the translators to determine the meaning for him.

I think Rodney Decker convinced me that it actually takes a better more solid understanding of both English (or the receptor language) and the Biblical languages to produce a smooth rendering than it does to produce a literal rendering. He also wrote an article critiquing the ESV and cocluded in the end that it really isn’t that much different than the NIV.

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2

Benjamin Lucas on May 24, 2020 at 9:19 am
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It is a nice example. But it is clearly overly simplistic to suggest a “literal” translation doesn’t have something to offer. Take, for example, in James 1 πειρασμός tends to be rendered “test” and in the Lord’s prayer “temptation”. Is there a connection? Perhaps, perhaps not. But if you only have an English with different (albeit contextually correct) words. The possibility never arises.

In this instance one is best served (short of learning Greek!) by two translations. I’m not sure it’s helpful to make the issue one of sides.

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  Mike Aubrey on May 24, 2020 at 2:41 pm
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  I’m going to have to disagree. I don’t think there’s anything “clearly overly simplistic” in my suggestion. If anything, it is profoundly complicated. That’s the entire reason everyone argues about it so much.
  
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    Benjamin M R Lucas on May 27, 2020 at 12:03 am
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    Thank you for your reply. I agree with you and really enjoy the discussion. I guess my comment is more about the problem of connotation in language. My contention was just that sometimes an isomorphic translation may allow these links to be seen in a way potentially obscured in a “meaning based” translation. Do you see this as an issue? I fear the answer is that we have simply reached the limits of translation at this point!
    
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    - 5
      
      Mike Aubrey on May 27, 2020 at 3:19 pm
      
      A good meaning-based translation will, at the front end of the work, establish a fairly substantial list of essential or key words and concepts that need to be communicated across the larger spans of text. Sometimes isomorphism is a means of effecting those links. The challenge is that to simply assume that isomorphism is the only way to communicate those relationships is itself a lexical fallacy: words are not concepts. The meaning-oriented translator isn’t ignoring those relationships. Rather they are weighing the all the other costs and what they would have to sacrifice to maintain isomorphism.
      
      My experience is that translators working within a meaning-based model actually spend far more time worrying about these difficulties and questions than translators who prioritize isomorphic concordance.
      
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6

Keith Wessel on May 25, 2020 at 6:49 am
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As a Greek teacher, I often will have my students do both a literal and an idiomatic translation of a passage or section. I do this do that I can tell they understand the Greek. So, for participles, e.g. I like hearing , “the having been summoned from the field servant”…and then have them smooth it out.

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