The Bible Translator, vol.52, no.3, 306-320.

For quotable version: see http://tbt.sagepub.com/content/52/3.toc

The Bible Translator, vol.52, no.3, 306-320.

Lourens de Vries

BIBLE TRANSLATIONS: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

The author is a translation advisor with the United Bible Societies for projects in Indonesia, holds the Chair of Bible translation at the Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and is a senior researcher in the Leiden University Spinoza Project.

Introduction

Bible translations are texts with specific religious and secular functions that vary in time and place. The historicity of the functions of Bible translations immediately surfaces when one compares Bible translating in New Guinea and in the Netherlands. In the New Guinea projects that I serve as an United Bible Societies advisor, the function is a missionary function, the translation is part of an effort to establish and build a church. The translation is usually the first translation in that language, it is a new genre functioning within a new institutional context: the emerging christian church (see De Vries 1999, 2000 for a discussion of the nature of Bible translations in New Guinea’s predominantly oral communities from a historical and anthropological genre perspective). Functionally, the situation in New Guinea is rather straightforward and the problem is to find appropriate language forms that serve the goal of communicating the good message of Jesus to people who do not know Him and know very little about the world in which Jesus lived and died. Getting the message across with minimal misunderstandings is of prime importance.

This relatively straightforward functional framework for New Guinea translation projects is a very temporary one: within a few generations almost all of these communities will be bilingual and many people will have access to Bible translations in Indonesian, English or Tok Pisin, often to several translations in those languages. When these national language versions get a place in the life of the community, the functional picture is complicated and some sort of function specialisation will take place. A new vernacular version will have to define its function in relation to the other versions used by the community. And translations in New Guinea will increasingly be produced by members of the young churches for those young churches. It will be very interesting to see what kind of skopos or translators’ brief these churches will formulate and how national language versions interact or perhaps interfere with the formulation of that brief.

In the Netherlands the functional framework is different. Bible translations are an old genre of texts and there are dozens of translations. In such a situation function specialisation inevitably takes place. There is the usual denominational specialisation (for example Roman Catholic versus Protestant translations) having to do with the history of the churches. But also within communities and groups of readers there is a strong tendency to use more than one Bible translation for various functions: for example, many Protestants use the Goed Nieuws Bijbel (a common language translation) at home for private reading or family reading but in many Protestant churches the Nieuwe Vertaling (1951_,_ a rather literal translation) is used in the liturgy.

The following major functions[1] may be distinguished for Bible translations in the Netherlands: liturgical and church functions, study function, common language function, secular literary-cultural functions, and private reading/home function. [2]As far as the literary-cultural functions are concerned, with more than half of the community not a member of any church and not qualifying themselves as christian, it is not surprising that Bible translations are read by many Dutch people to have access to the Bible as an important literary and cultural heritage document from antiquity. Of course, some of these functions overlap and various groups of readers fill in these functional roles in various ways. For example, in some church communities more than one translation functions in the liturgy. And in communities with a strong missionary tradition, common language translation may serve in chuch services in order to make communication easier for outsiders.

Where Bible translations are an old genre of texts, like in Dutch or Malay speaking communities, with many translations to choose from, every new translation project has to face the complex issue of defining its skopos, the functions it intends to have, the audiences it wants to serve and the functional relations it has with existing translations. Given a functional profile, the translation team has to choose language forms in such a way that those functions indeed can be fullfilled by the translation.

A new consensus has emerged in translation studies that the function of translations in target communities necessarily differs from the function that source texts had in their original settings and that the function of the translation “..is not arrived at automatically from an analysis of the source text, but is pragmatically defined by the purpose of the communication” (Christiane Nord 1991:9). Robinson (1997:208) formulates these implications of the work of Nord and other German translation theorists within the skopos approach: “Implications: (1) that translations are intended to serve some social function or functions; (2) that these functions are not textual abstractions like “the rhetorical function” or “the informative function,” but extratextual actions designed to shape how people behave in a social context; (3) that these functions cannot be determined in stable or permanent ways but must be renegotiated “pragmatically” in every new communicative context; and (4) that the guiding factor in these negotiations is the purpose (skopos) of the intercultural communication, what the various people hope to achieve in and through it.”

A single translation can never reflect all aspects of the source text. Translations always select certain aspects of the source text and it is the social function, the skopos, of the translation that determines the nature of the translational filter. For example, in a missionary framework where the translation is a pioneer translation, conveying the literary and rhetorical aspects of the source texts has lower priority than communicating, as clearly as possible, the basic messages of the source texts as perceived by the missionary translator. Any cultural or rhetorical aspect of the source text deemed to be non-essential to the basic message, will not be retained when it complicates the communicative process.

The emphasis on the social functions of translations does not imply that translation agencies like the United Bible Societies and Wycliffe Bible Translators should leave it totally to communities and audiences to define the skopos and type of the translation. Rather in a process of negotiation these agencies, together with the communities they serve, should formulate the functional profile of the translation. Translation agencies bring in their rich traditions and expertise of translating Scriptures but should also listen carefully to the needs of the communities. I see it as a major challenge for the United Bible Societies and other agencies to develop a theoretical framework within which such functional profiles of Bible translations can be defined and compared both within one language community and across language communities, and within which methods are developed to link forms and functions of Bible translations in a systematic fashion.

In this article I concentrate on two crucial issues, the division of interpretative labour between translator and audience and the degree of interference from the biblical source texts. Assuming that translating always involves some degree of interference and some degree of interpretative activity, I propose that degrees of interference and division of interpretative labour should be systematically linked to the functional profile of a Bible translation

The division of interpretative labour

For reasons of space, I limit myself to the relation between the function of a translation and the explication of contextual implications. Contextual implications are inferred by language users solely on the basis of the (verbal, situational, cultural-historical) context of the utterance. When I say "it rained cats and dogs and I am soaked" an obvious inference of the addressee will be that I meant that I am wet BECAUSE of the rain. This causal inference, however, is nowhere expressed in the utterance form, it is a contextual implication or inference of causality.

Such gaps between what is meant and what is said constantly occur in normal verbal communication. If speakers or writers would explicate all the information that is normally inferred by addressees, they would need very many, boring and needless words to get simple messages across. Apart from this quantitative reason, there are important qualitative reasons for the gap. If someone calls God his rock, he or she means a whole range of things, a range cannot be delineated very sharply, a quality of open-endedness that is precisely the point of using a metaphor. Utterances do not express what people want to communicate but rather they mediate speakers' intentions within a given context shared between speaker/writer and audience.

The causal inference in the example "it rained cats and dogs and I am soaked" is not part of the meaning of the sentence in a more narrow, semantic sense. Grice (1975) gave the distinction between meaning and contextual implications a definitive place in semantic theory. Comrie (1985) showed in terms of the analysis of tense systems how difficult but at the same time essential it is for linguists to distinguish between meanings and (contextual) interpretations of utterances. Gutt (1991) formulates some major consequences of the Gricean distinctions (as elaborated in Sperber and Wilson 1986) for translation theory.

Contextual implications have two characteristics that make them tricky for translators. First, when the translator has no longer direct access to the original utterance context (primary context), it becomes hard to establish what the contextual implications of an utterance are. In the case of ancient texts like those in the Bible access to the primary context is extremely limited. Furthermore, not all contextual implications have the same status: some are strong, others are weak contextual implications; in fact, some contextual implications are so weak that we are not sure whether they are writer/speaker-intended implications at all. In the exegetical process of reconstructing the contextual implications of a biblical utterance, inevitably there is interpretative interference from the historical, theological and cultural context of the translator.

The second source of difficulties is this: given that a translator has established what the contextual implications are and how strong they are, as soon as the translator explicates contextual implications, a new series of difficulties emerges since in the process of explicating information, that information is essentially changed (Gutt 1991): it is now asserted information having its own contexual implications and the explication causes changes in focality and emphasis in the message.

In all translations there are unavoidable shifts in the area of contextual implications: some implications become explicit in the translation and explicated elements from the source become contextually implied in the translation. The structural differences between languages cause thousands of such shifts in translations. For example, Indonesian does not have number distinctions in nouns but Greek has. This leads to shifts from explicated number meanings in the source (singular/plural) to contextually implied number information in the translation. Whatever the function of a Bible translation, such shifts cannot be avoided, there is no choice. However, there are also many situations in which it is up to the translator to decide whether and to which extent contextual implications of the source become explicit in the translation.

The gap in normal, unmarked primary communication between what is meant and what is expressed, should not be confused with deliberate, intended polyinterpretability. When I say, it rained and I am soaked, I trust that you infer the causal relationship and I do not intend to leave open any other interpretations. Intended polyinterpretability is in most speech communities linked to certain genres of texts like some types of poetry or other marked forms of language.

The question how to handle the normal, unmarked interpretative gap between expression and intention in the translation should be answered primarily on the basis of the answer to another question: what kind of audiences is going to use the text and what kinds of things they are going to do with it. By choosing specific lexical, morphosyntactic and other devices speakers and writers of all languages can manage and adjust levels of explication and implication in their utterances. Adnominal genitives in the New Testament are famous for their low level of explication. The adnominal genitive just predicates that there is a meaningful relation between the (pro)noun in the genitive and the headnominal. It is up to the addressee to infer the nature of that relation in the context of the utterance. When writers of New Testament Greek want to increase the level of explication, they may choose and indeed do choose more specific morphosyntactic devices. Compare tèn ek theou dikaiosunèn ‘the righteousness from God’in Philippians 3.9a with the source preposition ek and in Romans 1.17 dikaiosunè theou ‘righteousness of God’.

Now consider the phrase en prautèti sophias in James 3.13 (literally: with humility/gentleness of wisdom). The genitive sophias expresses only the fact that wisdom somehow qualifies the humility (or gentleness) and the author left it to his readers to infer the specific nature of that qualification. In terms of the explication/implication balance, translators into Dutch have a number of options. (For the sake of illustrating the argument I discuss the translation of biblical phrases in isolation, without taking into account the translation of the verses, pericopes and books that they are part of). The first would be to choose a construction in Dutch with more or less the same level of explication:

(a) met wijze zachtmoedigheid/nederigheid (with wise gentleness/humility)

The second option would be something like (b) which changes the level of explication rather drastically:

(b) met zachtmoedigheid/nederigheid die uit wijsheid voortkomt (with gentleness/humility that comes from wisdom)

Now translations of type (a) and (b) differ crucially in terms of the division of interpretative labour: (a) leaves it to the reader to infer the precise ways in which wisdom qualifies the humility while (b) explicates the relation between humility and wisdom as one of source: humility comes from wisdom.

In transforming possible and indeed likely contextual implications like the source relation in our example into expressed information in the translation, in changing what was possibly meant in the source into what is positively asserted in the translation, the nature of the information changes essentially: the source relation between wisdom and humility becomes much more focal in the translated text than in the original; also, the translator takes the responsibility for presenting the contextually implied source relation as asserted information.

Although all languages have ranges of constructions that allow language users to manage levels of explication, it is dangerous to assume from superficial formal similarities across languages that constructions of similar form can be used for the same things. For example, it would be dangerous to equate the Greek adn genitives with Dutch adnominal van phrases. Although there are functional overlaps, there are also usages of the NT Greek adnominal genitive which are impossible in Dutch, for example the (semitising) usage of the genitive to express a quality of the referent of the head nominal as in huios tès anomias, literally ‘son of lawlessness’. Therefore, choosing target language forms with comparable levels of explication and implication as source forms is something very different from translating literally or translating with the aim to create maximal formal correspondence with the source.

Another danger in the translational analysis of New Testament genitives would be not to distinguish between the linguistic meaning of the adnominal genitive construction and its in principle unlimited number of contextually inferrable interpretations. Because of its function as a generic construction, the only meaning signalled by the adnominal genitive is this: the headnominal A and the genitival nominal B stand in a meaningful relationship and the addressee is kindly requested to sort out that relationship given the context. By calling all sorts of possible contextual interpretations of the adnominal genitive meanings signalled by that form, translators may feel forced to express those meanings independent of the function of the translation and independent of the reasons why the author choose a highly generic construction. In doing so they would skip the methodological preliminary issue of choosing appropriate levels of explication given the function of the translation project.

The point of translation (a) (“with wise humility” for en prautèti sophias in James 3.13) is not that it closer to the source form than (b) (“with humility that comes from wisdom”). Both (a) and (b) deviate from the morphosyntax of the Greek phrase. A formal equivalence type of rendering in Dutch would be solution (c) in which the preposition van signals the genitive case:

(c) met zachtmoedigheid van wijsheid (with gentleness of wisdom)

In translation (c) Greek nouns have been translated with Dutch nouns, and the Greek order of those nouns is also retained. Solutions of type (c) could be called form-oriented, of type (b) interpretation-oriented and of type (a) meaning-oriented. Notice that I employ the distinction meaning and interpretation here in the sense of Grice (1975) as outlined above.

Translations of type (c) that concentrate on the form of the source and translations of type (a) that focus on the expressed meanings of the source both keep closer to the Greek than interpretation-oriented versions. If one thinks in a dichotomy of free versus literal translations, types (a) and (c) could easily be lumped together as “literal” translations. This would not do justice to the essential differences between them.The aim of (a) is not to stay close to the form but to the expressed meanings of the source, leaving contextual implications to the reader to infer. For example, whereas form-oriented translations try to translate nouns with nouns, and verbs with verbs, keeping wordcategories constant across languages is not at all a goal of type (a) translations. Also, translating a source word with the same target word all the time irrespective of contextually determined senses of words, just to reflect the lexical form of the source, is not an aim of type (a) translations whereas such concordance or verbal consistency is a typical aim of form-oriented translations

It is clear that meaning-oriented translations of type (a) that leave a lot of interpretative work to the readers or listeners, are harder to understand and less accessible. On the other hand, such translations suffer less from the interpretative inference from the translators' theological and cultural context that is unavoidable in interpretation-oriented translations that explicate contextual implications of complex texts of antiquity for which the primary contexts have become inaccessible. Form-oriented translations are hardest to understand since they not only leave a lot of interpretative work to the reader but also suffer from lexical and morphosyntactic interference from the source language.

In the near future we will see that there will be a increasing demand for translations leaving more interpretative work to the reader in communities that have only one vernacular version with a missionary skopos. Such a demand is a healthy sign: the situation in which one type of translation has the monopoly should be only temporary. Translations always highlight certain aspects of the source at the expense of other. And one type of translation is not enough for the various things people want to do with the Bible. The increasing bilingualism of most small ethnolinguistic minority groups will solve the practical problem that it is impossible to produce two or more vernacular versions of the Bible for all these groups. Vernacular and national language Bibles will get their own place in the life of such communities. Just like code-switching is normal for them, Bible-switching will become normal, also within the liturgal setting.

Translations that spell out contextual implications for certain audiences and certain functions may do so in order to help the reader to construe the relationships between elements in a complex text, like the source relationship between humility and wisdom in James 3.13 (compare the New International Version: ¼humility that comes from wisdom).

Another motivation behind explicating contextually implied information is to guide the reader to the right referents of phrases in the source, to prevent misunderstandings. Take translations of the phrase hoi Ioudaioi ‘the Jews’ that narrow down the range of reference in the translation by using phrases like ‘the Jewish leaders’ in contexts where translations with ‘the Jews’ sound anti-Jewish in modern ears. Again, it is the function or skopos of the translation in the target community that should be the basis for the translational decision. For a common language translation, explicating the intended ranges of reference of hoi Ioudaioi would be appropriate as it prevents unintended anti-Jewish readings among uninformed readers. For a church translation, I would prefer ‘the Jews’ in most cases since most church communities would be able and would want to carry out such interpretative tasks themselves. Notice that, again, explicating contextually implied referents, essentially changes the nature of the information: the generalising overtones of the hoi Ioudaioi phrase (possibly reflecting Church and Synagogue conflicts (Ellingworth 1998: 128)) are lost and the translation now asserts that the Jewish leaders and not others did so and so.

Degrees of interference and the function of Bible translations

Whenever thought patterns or cultural practices from the target community that are foreign to the source community, are discernible in the translation, there is interpretative inference. And whenever language patterns of the source that are foreign to the target language are discernible in the translation there is linguistic interference. Here I concentrate on linguistic interference.

It is crucial to realize that the communicative consequences of linguistic interference depend on various factors, the most important two being the level at which interference takes place and second, the presence or absence of mimetic traditions for specific levels of language in a community.

Language interference may take place at various levels such as (a) the level of the lexico-semantic and grammatical patterns of a language, (b) the literary, stylistic and rhetorical patterns, (c) the pragmatic level, including the patterns known as the ethnography of speaking (Foley 1997), or any other level that linguistic models and theories may wish to distinguish. The communicative effects vary radically with the level of linguistic interference: a well-known and funny example of the impact of lexical interference is when in translating from English to Dutch every occurrence of to run is rendered by rennen in Dutch independent of the collocation patterns of Dutch:

(a) the boy ran de jongen rende

(b) the tights ran de kousen renden

(c) the paint ran de verf rende

This has an hilarious and dramatic communicative effect since in Dutch (b) and (c) assert that the tights and the paint were walking fast.

Now in communities with a long tradition of translating sacred texts like the Bible, some audiences have developed a high tolerance for this sort of lexical interference as long as it is confined to translations of sacred texts, the idea being that if God choose for example the word psuchè or sarks in various places in the NT through mechanic inspiration of human authors, that then every occurrence of that word, irrespective of its contextual sense, should be rendered by one and the same target word, in this case soul or flesh. I call such traditions of interference mimetic traditions, in this case a mimetic tradition of pseudo-concordance at the level of lexical patterns.

It goes without saying that mimetic traditions at the level of lexico-semantic and grammatical patterns have greatly hindered audiences in grasping what biblical verses meant to say. It is impossible to ignore the basic lexical and grammatical patterns of target languages without causing dramatic amounts of misunderstandings. It is no doubt interference at this level that gave the phenomenon of interference such a bad reputation among most translators of the Bible.

However, interference may also take place at other levels of language and one should not confuse the communicative effects of interference at one level with the effects at other levels. At the rhetorical level it is not difficult to find examples of interference that have been accepted in very many translations of various type and skopos. Many communities have mimetic traditions reflecting core aspects of Hebrew poetics in translations of Old Testament passages. Hebrew parallellism for example is deeply rooted in many translational traditions. This is interference of the purest type but at the rhetorical level.

Communities like the Dutch community that have a tradition of speaking foreign languages and of reading and translating literatures of other language communities including Far Eastern communities have a rich store of mimetic traditions at the rhetorical and pragmatic levels, not only deriving from the Bible but also from other works of Antiquity and of the cultures of India and Indonesia.

Such mimetic traditions create a potential for mimicking pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of source texts without creating major misunderstandings. An example at the pragmatic level of politeness would be shifts of grammatical person for politeness reasons. Although in modern Dutch, speakers do not refer to themselves in third person forms of servility (your servant asks permission to leave = I ask permission to leave) or address people for politeness reasons with third person forms (Does Father want another cup of coffee? = Father, do you want another cup of coffee?), most Dutch people readily recognise such pragmatic patterns, whether in translations of Javanese fairy tales or in OT stories because of the presence of mimetic traditions. This strongly decreases the risks of misunderstanding such person shifts.

In Dutch Bible translations with church functions but also with literary-cultural functions for an educated secular audience, certain amounts of rhetorical and pragmatic interference are acceptable and should not be judged from the perspective of lexico-semantic and grammatical interference against which Bible translators of earlier generations have had to fight. Of course, in common language translations, let alone in missionary translations in communities without mimetic traditions, there is hardly place for interference at any level.

An advantage of allowing certain types of pragmatic and rhetorical interference in Bible translations with selected functional profiles is that it makes it possible to do justice to the growing body of insights from anthropological linguistics about the cultural meanings of a considerable number of pragmatic patterns that belong to the domain of the ethnography of speaking.

The last two decennia much research in anthropological linguistics has been devoted to the ways in which certain discursive patterns are embedded in, and indexical of, cultural practices in communities (brilliantly summarized by Foley (1997)). For example, Foley (1997:259) writes about patterns of greeting in Wolof and Australian communities: “The contrast between the cultural meanings implicit in the Australian/American greeting encounter and that of the Wolof greeting could not be more glaring: the former is an assertion of social equality, real or imagined, highlighted in these cultures’ideologies, while the latter is nothing less than an enaction of social inequality, implicit in this culture’s local ideology and the basis of its social organization ..”. Such differences have obvious consequences for translations: in translating a Wolof text into English, English greetings, even when they have overlapping cultural functions, cannot be used as cultural substitutes for Wolof greetings, without serious loss of cultural meanings. Other topics beside greeting systems in this line of research are the linguistic construction of personhood, of gender, cultural variations in norms for informativeness, (in)directness and redundancy, and other areas where linguistic behaviour is embedded in cultural practices and ideologies.

In the area of the linguistic construction of personhood an example would be sociocentric patterns of referring to persons (Foley 1997). Local conceptions of personhood have been studied in cultural anthropology in terms of egocentric and sociocentric ideologies (Geertz 1983). In sociocentric communities persons are largely understood to be their social positions, the person is a summation of the network of social roles and relations. Two misunderstandings should be cleared away immediately. First, there are crucial differences between the various sociocentric communities and these lead to different articulations of sociocentric understanding and ideology (see Rosaldo 1984 ). Second, sociocentric conceptions of personhood may co-occur with well-developed awareness of one’s individuality. The Korowai and other egalitarian communities of New Guinea for example combine an emphasis on the physical and oratorical strenght of individuals as crucial for achieving authority with a sociocentric conception of personhood (De Vries and Van Enk 1997).

Sociocentric conceptions of the person express themselves in various ways in language. Shweder and Bourne (1984) point out how the Oriyas of India tend to describe personalities in terms of a cases and context approach in which a person’s behavior is characterized in social interactional context. When a woman is described as friendly, this would take a form like, “she brings cakes to my family on festival days” or an agressive man as one who shouts curses at his neighbours. Although personal names may be used, people are preferably referred to and addressed in terms of kinship and descent, profession, class, or other socially relevant aspects of their position in the community. In some sociocentric communities this preference is so strong that using personal names is considered very inappropriate in most contexts.

Geertz (1983:59) defines the egocentric conception of the person along these lines: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background¼”. In Dutch society it considered essential to distinguish an individual sharply from his or her position in society. To “reduce” a person to a cluster of roles and positions would go against the fundamental value of the individual, autonomous person. Persons tend to be characterized as “hostile”or “friendly” in Dutch in a way that abstracts from the social, dyadic contexts in which such characteristics are played out. People exchange personal names as soon as possible and these, rather than positional or relational terms, are then used to address and refer to people.

The Old Testament is a collection of writings originating in strongly sociocentric communities where a person is primarily seen from the perspective of social roles and relations, and of the prerogatives and obligations that go with these roles and relations. Since kinship and descent is a crucial factor in determining a person’s social role and position, there is constant mentioning of the tribe or nation in which a person is born, the lineage, the family, kinship relations to socially or historically important persons. Besides genealogy, place of birth, profession or occupation , political affiliation or other things directly relevant to a person’s social position may be mentioned.

In the little book of Ruth, participants like Boaz, Ruth and Naomi are good examples of persons that are referred to in sociocentric terms: there is a constant mentioning of their kinship relations , ethnic origin and the social obligations and prerogatives that go with their social position.

Take the dialogue between Naomi and Ruth when Ruth returns from the field of Boaz (2.19-23). At that point in the story the readers know very well that Naomi and Ruth relate to each other as mother-in-law and daugther-in-law. Yet the Hebrew text refers to Naomi and Ruth in 2.19 to 2.23 five times in five verses in terms of their affinal kinship relation, combining these kinship references with proper name references.

These 'redundant' sociocentric participant identifications are an example of a pragmatic pattern that is embedded in specific cultural practices. The cultural practice relevant in this case is rooted in sociocentric conceptions of the person, in the words of Foley (1997: 269): '..persons are largely understood to be their social positions..'. It seems that, just like the societies of New Guinea that I lived in, ancient Israel viewed persons primarily in terms of their relational position in society. Genealogies, references to profession or role, membership of ethnic or political groups, are culturally crucial and the pragmatics of participant handling is embedded in these cultural practices.

This constant mentioning of a person's tribe, clan, family and so on, is highly redundant and 'unnatural' from the point of view of the pragmatics of redundancy in primary Dutch texts and accordingly the Groot Nieuws Bijbel (GNB, 1988) eliminates the four references to the affinal kinship relation of Naomi and Ruth in 2.19-2.22 while retaining them in 2.18 and 2.23. The Nieuwe Vertaling (NV, 1951) follows the participant references of the Hebrew source:

NV 2.19a: zei haar schoonmoeder tot haar

said her mother-in-law to her

GNB 2.19a: vroeg Noomi..

asked Naomi

NV 2.19b: vertelde ze haar schoonmoeder

told she her mother-in-law

GNB 2.19b: vertelde Ruth

told Ruth

NV 2.20: zei Naomi tot haar schoondochter

said Naomi to her daughter-in-law

GNB 2.20: zei Noomi

said Naomi

NV 2.22: zei Naomi tot Ruth, haar schoondochter

said Naomi to Ruth, her daughter-in-law

GNB 2.22: zei Noomi

said Naomi

By eliminating the repeated references to the mother-in-law/daugther-in-law relation in these verses, GNB makes the story more like a story told in the Dutch way contrasting with the more sociocentric participant handling of the Hebrew source reflected in the NV version. The GNB sounds like a Dutch primary text but at a price: inasfar as the sociocentric pragmatics of person references is embedded in Hebrew cultural practices, the GNB partly cuts that tie to the world behind the story of Ruth. The sociocentric ideology reflected in such person references is partly ‘domesticated’ to use the terminology of Venuti (1995) and the ‘foreign’ sociocentric values are re-expressed to a certain extent in terms of the more familiar egocentric values of the target community. Hatim and Mason (1997:145) talk about a ‘normalizing and neutralizing effect’ in this context.

The five references to the affinal relation between Ruth and Naomi in five verses of the NV version clearly constitute a violation of Dutch redundancy norms for primary texts and create pragmatic interference, making the text sound foreign, at least in the ears of some audiences. This last qualification is crucial since it points to the flexibility, openess and variability of the pragmatic component of languages: for some audiences perceiving the Dutch story of Ruth in the NV version as a secondary text, the foreigness is, paradoxically, natural. Mimetic traditions at the level of person references make it possible for church people raised in such traditions and for educated, secular audiences to suspend pragmatic norms derived from primary Dutch texts and to take the five 'redundant' references to the affinal relation in 2.19-22 as a linguistic reflex of cultural practices of other peoples, as the reflection in language of a different way of life, rather than as bad Dutch.

Ruth 1.4 tells us that Ruth is from Moab but so do 1.22, 2.2, 2.21 and 4.10: and additional four times 'Ruth, the Moabitess'. From a sociocentric perspective, the Moabite origin of Ruth is a central element in her identity and in the development of her identity: as often in the OT mentioning of sociocentric information has a spiritual and ‘theological’ dimension. Ruth’s relationship to Israel and its God is portrayed against the background of Moab’s relationship with Israel and its God and against that background Ruth comes to the statement so crucial in the development of her identity in the story in 1.17: 'your people shall be my people and your God shall be my God'. The Moabitess Ruth is loyal to and chooses to follow her Israelite mother-in-law and her God.

Repeating the Moabite origin of Ruth all the time that the source mentions it sounds rather redundant in Dutch, especially in 2.2 so soon after the last mentioning in 1.22. In the Groot Nieuws Bijbel (GNB) of 1988, in 2.2 and 2.21 the apposition 'de Moabitische' is left out. In the last verse of chapter 1, the GNB once again emphatically indicates the Moabite origin of Ruth and the GNB translators apparently felt it to be a violation of Dutch redundancy patterns to repeat the Moabite origin 'again' in the verses 2 and 21 of the second chapter.

Just like the issue of the division of interpretative labour, this issue of how to handle degrees and levels of interference should be analysed in the framework of the the question who is going to use the Bible translation for what purposes. A common language translation of Ruth, like the GNB, is correct in partly adjusting the sociocentric person references of the Hebrew source towards the egocentric person reference practices of the target audience but for other audiences that use the translation of Ruth to have access to a literary work of Antiquity, as a literary and cultural experience or for audiences that listen to the reading of the Bible at church, the translation would do well to retain the sociocentric flavour of the source. The resulting interference has a different communicative effect on this audience in that context of usage: they recognise the “strangeness” of the person references as a reflection of different cultural practices than their own.

It is important to realize that allowing a measure of interference on the level of the sociocentric ethnography of speaking does not imply that formal correspondence is sought with the Hebrew expressions of Ruth’s Moabite origin. That would cause interference on the morphosyntactic level. Thus a range of expressions like ‘from Moab’or ‘who originated in Moab’ or ‘a woman from Moab’ would be available for a translator.

Summary

It is impossible to keep the function of the source text intact in the transfer from one language to another: the translation always functions in a totally different socio-historical context. If it is the case that the function of the translation does not automatically follow from the analysis of the source text, then it is important to explicate the intended functions of a translation as the basis for the translation strategy.

Increasingly, people will use more than translation of the Bible in the different contexts of their lives, for different purposes. In countries with many small ethnolinguistic minorities, people will use translations in national languages and vernacular versions in different contexts. When people use more versions, inevitably function specialisation takes place. In this article I have reflected on the complex issues involved in systematically relating form and skopos of translations in this context of function specialisation. I considered two areas in particular, the division of interpretative labour between translator and audience and degrees and levels of interference.

As far as linguistic interference is concerned, it is important to realize that the communicative consequences of linguistic interference depend on various factors, the most important two being the level at which interference takes place and second, the presence or absence of mimetic traditions for specific levels of language in a community. Language interference may take place at various levels such as (a) the level of the lexico-semantic and grammatical patterns of a language, (b) the literary, stylistic and rhetorical patterns, (c) the pragmatic level, including the patterns known as the ethnography of speaking.

Communities with a long tradition of translating the Bible and other texts from distant cultures have mimetic traditions, that is, it has become possible to use forms of such target languages to reflect certain aspects of the verbal behaviour of other communities without causing major misunderstandings. This use of mimetic traditions is possible but only under certain conditions: it is restricted to secondary communication situations that are clearly marked as such, it is restricted to particular audiences within these communities that are familiar with such mimetic traditions and with reading texts from distant cultures and finally it is restricted to certain levels of linguistic interference. For example, interference at the level of lexical, morphological and syntactic patterns has disastrous communicative effects but at the level of ethnography of speaking, a level where cultural meanings play a crucial role, interference phenomena do not pose major communicative problems, assuming of course that the translation is used for the purposes and audiences for which it was designed. Allowing interference in the translation along these lines no doubt decreases the accessibility and ease of understanding of translations. On the other hand, cultural meanings linked to patterns of language use are conveyed to audiences receptive to this type of translation.

Utterances do not express what people want to communicate but rather they mediate speakers' intentions within a given context shared between speaker/writer and audience. Thus there is always a gap between what is said and what is meant. The question how to handle this interpretative gap between expression and intention in the translation should be answered primarily on the basis of the answer to another question: what kind of audiences is going to use the text and what kinds of things they are going to do with it. By choosing specific lexical, morphosyntactic and other devices speakers and writers of all languages can manage and adjust levels of explication and implication in their utterances. Translators face the question whether to adjust the explication/implication balance or to aim at minimising such adjustments. Common language and missionary translation will demand major adjustments in this respects resulting in interpretation-oriented translational solutions. Considerable amounts of interpretative interference are unavoidable in such translations. Translations with church-internal functions or with literary-cultural functions will require much less adjustments in this respect but place higher demands on the interpretative abilities of the designed audience.

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Versions quoted:

NV: Nieuwe Vertaling, Haarlem 1951, Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap

GNB: Groot Nieuws Bijbel Haarlem, 1988, Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap.

[1] See Wonderly (1968) for a description of Bible translation types from the perspective of their social and cultural functions. He divides English versions into common, literary and traditional-church translations.

[2]See Johns (2000) for an in-depth discussion of the requirements for a liturgical and literary English translation.