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September 22, 2005
On Translation
Tyler Williams at Codex Blog has a very good discussion of translation with a great curiosity arousing title to boot, "Dogs, Urine, and Bible Translations." While his comments relate directly to the translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, they can be easily extrapolated to any translation.
He offers a useful line chart illustrating a spectrum of the linguistic form of translations. This spectrum ranges from "formal" to "paraphrase" with "dynamic" somewhere in the middle. He then places various translations of the Bible along that spectrum. The King James Version is, in his opinion, the most "formal," meaning very close to word for word, while the Living Bible is a paraphrase. Translations like the New English Bible he places in the "dynamic" range, meaning the translation is "sense for sense." Williams adds a lot of important nuance to this discussion by reflecting on denotative and connotative meaning. His discussion is well worth reading.
Reading Williams' post made me worry, wonder, think about where my translation of the texts in the short cuneiform alphabet fall on his spectrum. Often translations of these kinds of texts are very formal. This is partially because one wants the translation to assist the reader in understanding the way the translator understands the grammar of the source language. As in the case of my translations, they are, in one sense, byproducts of the real nuts and bolts work of coming to terms with these texts.
Let's look at the how I translated lines 2 and 3 of KTU 1.77:
2) []May Ba['al] bless him[ ]
3) [](May) Ba'al bless (this?) p[itcher (?)]
Putting aside all the problems with this text and these two lines in particular and assuming that I have the grammar and vocabulary correct and that the reconstructions are also correct, what can be said about this translation?
First, the word I translate, "may he bless" is in the energic: a mode that we do not have as a formal mode in English. So I think this translation is still fairly formal. But there are other choices on how one might translate the energic. For example, if I wanted to be even more formal I might have simply translated, "Ba'al Blesses him!" When I look at my translation of line 3 a whole different dynamic comes to the forefront. There is not a single internal formal clue that the verb in line 3 is in the energic mode. It is, however, the same verb as in line 2. I use the parentheses to signal the reader that something is up and then go head and translate this line as if the verb were in the energic anyway. Why? Because I think the context implies such an understanding. Now, my translation of line 3 is clearly a "dynamic" translation. Any one who does not accept my reconstruction of the last word in the line might say it is a purely speculative translation. But then I believe that the extent to which a translation is speculative is on an axis which is orthogonal to the one Williams presents. It may be that there is some correlation between speculation and linguistic form as one moves to the right along Williams' spectrum but there need not be.
How about the seriously fragmented tablet KTU 4.31 that I am hoping to post on in a day or two? This tablet is something like a receipt with, among other things, numbers on several lines. What the numbers refer to is often broken off. Of example, in lines 4, 5 and 6 only the number 15 preceded by a preposition can be read. A strictly formal translation would be something like, "For 15 . . ." However, I feel quite confident that one can translate these lines, "For 15 shekels . . ." even though the word shekel never appears in the text. In the context of the many texts in the same general genre, it is clear that "shekels" is implied. Just as we say, "do you have change for a twenty?" without needing to add the words "dollar bill" these texts say, "for 15" or "for 4" meaning some number of shekels.
I think that in large contiguous texts with abundant linguistic and cultural context it is possible to maintain a consistent linguistic form in translation. But in short, fragmented texts of uncertain context and perhaps even uncertain language, it is hard and possibly detrimental to be consistent. On the other hand, I may just be making a convenient excuse for my own inconsistencies.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 22, 2005 10:09 AM | Read more on Ugarit |
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