How not to translate a technical term
I just stumbled on it again, in the process of checking a Nigerian translation of Exodus: "a tree called Acacia." The source: The UBS Translators' Handbook on Exodus, published in 1999. I don't know who started this bad advice, and I'm not interested in apportioning blame, but, now that we have the possibility of updating things in Paratext, can't we do something about expunging a few things that are clearly wrong? The first one of these I saw was, I believe, "an animal called 'kamel' in the Mark or Luke handbook, decades ago. So what's the problem, you ask. When a person says to another person, "I saw an animal called a camel, or a tree called 'acacia' she implies that the second person does not know the names of these things. When we do this in Scripture, we are saying that the Israelites did not know what acacias were, or camels. Louis Dorn once wrote a paper called "Reading Someone Else's Mail" in which he pointed out the essence of this issue. The Scriptures were written to a Middle Eastern audience thousands of years ago. We get to read them--second hand. They should not be translated as if current readers are the immediate receivers of the text.
If you agree, please contribute examples and exert some pressure on the powers that be to stop giving this bad advice via Paratext.
2 comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
Edward--you asked about skopos. Yes indeed. There should be a statement in every project brief about how they deal with technical terminology. I have not met a language yet that can't deal with technical terms somehow. And they can do it without skewing the pragmatics with "an X called Y".
Hi Rob, I don't know whether I will call the terms "camel" or "Acacia" tree as technical term. I will consider them as foreign Biblical term not known to the receptor language group's culture. In some current translation training material or handbooks as you mentioned suggesting an alternative using generic term and add the descriptive phrase. However,that is only one of the alternatives. Thank you for your input that this alternative may cause problem in the quotation. Making the implicit information too explicit or adding explanation to the first audience sound like the first audiece not knowin the Jewish background. I asked the translation team to have a session about strategy translating foreign unknown concept in their tranlsation brief. And I also ask them the question the desire of the degree of contextualization of the translated text, how foreign and domestic. Once we have these informations along with the style and philosophy of the translation from their translation profle/brief, we may have better ideas about how to translate the foriegn biblical terms. I found using extra textual strategy can can be helpful, but not without limitation, especially if the tranlsated text is in audio format.