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November 2020

Translation News

• Written versus Reading Tradition in the Hebrew Bible - Aaron Hornkohl
• Translation Studies Zoom Webinar with Lénart de Regt (UBS): Linguistic Coherence in Biblical Hebrew - 17 November 2020
• New Francophone Consultant - Judy Heath
• Discourse Analysis: Galatians as a Case Study - Stephen Levinsohn
• Preparing Translation Template - Ken Keyes
• Mentoring (online) Workshop Report - Michael Jemphrey
• TCDW 2021 - Registration Link
• History of Bible Translation video - Seed Company

Written versus Reading Tradition in the Hebrew Bible
Aaron Hornkohl
Aaron Hornkohl teaches courses in ancient and modern Hebrew literature and language, and history of the Hebrew language as well as courses relating to the history and culture of the Middle East at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in 2012 at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a dissertation on, “לשון ספר ירמיה ותולדות הלשון העברית [The Language of the Book of Jeremiah and the History of the Hebrew Language]." Aaron has also taught in Israel with JCBT in their Special Course for Bible Translators and with IBLT.

His most recent publication (co-edited with Geoffrey Khan) is: Studies in Semitic Vocalisation and Reading Traditions (Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures 3). Cambridge: University of Cambridge & Open Book Publishers (2020).

The standard Masoretic Hebrew Bible on which nearly all Old Testament translations are based comprises multiple layers of tradition, including the consonantal letters and the vowel diacritics. Throughout most of the Bible, the two layers are in sync, i.e., they represent the same tradition. Occasionally, however, they diverge, the consonantal tradition reflecting one tradition of pronunciation, and the vocalization a different tradition. In many such cases, the divergence is explicitly signaled via a sort of marginal note instructing readers to ignore the consonantal form (termed the ketiv, Aramaic for ‘[what is] written’) and to read the vocalization tradition instead (termed qere, Aramaic for ‘[what is] read’). Other times there is no explicit indication of divergence, beyond the vocalization signs themselves.

By and large, scholarly opinion holds that the consonantal tradition predates the vocalization. And it is true that some of the dissonance between written form and oral realization is due to secondary developments in the grammar and pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew manifest in the vocalization even as the typologically earlier features were preserved in the consonantal text. However, this is not the whole story. And there is a danger of underestimating the vocalization tradition’s considerable historical depth and undervaluing its textual and linguistic testimony. This is significant, because in the case of problem passages, textual critics, sometimes followed by translators, frequently disregard the Masoretic vocalization as inferior.

There is no doubt that the graphic vowel symbols are products of medieval times. The question concerns the antiquity of the reading tradition behind the diacritics, that is, of the oral realization of the text that the vowel points were developed to represent and preserve. In most cases where the written and reading traditions diverge, the reading tradition is manifestly later, but, as we’ll see, this needs to be nuanced.

A useful example involves the name of God. For the consonantal form יהוה, equivalent to English YHWH. While the earliest readers evidently had no qualms about pronouncing God’s personal name, the medieval Masoretic reading tradition consistently reflects an alternative pronunciation, usually the special plural-of-majesty form Adonai, meaning ‘My Lord’, sometimes Elohim ‘God’. In other words, the consonantal form YHWH is usually vocalized with the vowels of Adonai—which the knowledgeable reader would correctly render as Adonai (by contrast, some later untrained readers combined the consonants of YHWH and the vowels of Adonai, thereby accidentally inventing the hitherto unknown divine name YaHoWaH > ‘Jehovah’).

Against the suspicion that the substitution Adonai/Elohim for YHWH is no more than a case of rabbinic or medieval hypersensitivity to sacrilege, we see that the practice of reserving special treatment for the divine name was already widespread in the last centuries before the Common Era. In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls the name was written using letters from the old Canaanite alphabet to distinguish it from the surrounding text—presumably to keep readers from pronouncing the form as written. In the Samaritan and Aramaic reading traditions, God’s name was replaced with an Aramaic word meaning ‘the name’. In the Greek, Syriac, and Latin versions it was replaced with words meaning ‘Lord’—which remains a common strategy in Bible translation. And in some cases where the Masoretic Bible vocalizes YHWH as Adonai ‘my Lord’ or Elohim ‘god’, a parallel Dead Sea biblical text has the actual consonants of the replacement form. Clearly, in this case, the medieval Tiberian vocalisation preserves a much earlier, pre-medieval tradition.

Crucially, this example is just one of many in which the vocalization of the reading tradition contradicts the consonantal text of the written tradition by means of what looks like a secondary update. What has yet to receive sufficient attention is that in nearly all such cases, the secondary feature is itself ancient, often rooted in Second Temple Hebrew usage as found in consonantal evidence, and sometimes even appearing as a minority form in Classical Biblical and/or Iron Age inscriptional sources.

The upshot is clear: if such profound historical depth characterizes the most obvious secondary features of Tiberian vocalization, and if these are but a small fraction of the tradition, then it stands to reason that the vocalization is a far more valuable textual and linguistic witness than has often been assumed.

Lénart de Regt - Linguistic Coherence in Biblical Hebrew
Tuesday 17 November 2020 at 1-2:30 PM (UTC) - 7 am Dallas time

Join Drew Maust in this live webinar on linguistic coherence in Biblical Hebrew and the implications for Bible translation with Dr. Lénart de Regt (United Bible Societies), author of Linguistic Coherence in Biblical Hebrew Texts published by Gorgias Press (2019). Click here to register.

The webinar will consist of a 60 min interview and guided tour of the Balaam narrative (Numbers 22—24) followed by up to 30 min of question and answer from the audience.

Lénart's book, Linguistic Coherence in Biblical Hebrew, explores the distinct ways in which four discourse devices participate in establishing coherence in Biblical Hebrew texts: 1) arrangement of information, 2) participant reference devices, 3) verb forms, and their contribution to 4) textual segmentation and coherence. Bringing together linguistics, literary analysis, pragmatics, and translation methodology, he demonstrates how a thorough understanding of the functions of devices of linguistic coherence beyond the sentence level should be integrated into biblical translation methodology and Biblical Hebrew pedagogy.

Lénart de Regt (PhD Leiden 1988; Habilitation Strasbourg 2016) is Global Translation Advisor with the United Bible Societies (with special responsibility for Bible translation projects in Europe and the Russian Federation), Research Fellow at the Hebrew Department of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, and Affiliated Researcher at the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer of the VU University, Amsterdam. He has co-directed doctoral dissertations and been on dissertation committees at VU University and at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Strasbourg.

New Francophone Consultant
Judy Heath
SIL Africa Translation Consultant Accreditation Committee has reviewed and approved the application files of Judy Heath as a new Translation Consultant. Judy was mentored by Jackie Hainaut, as she conducted workshops in Translation Principles, One-Book Workshops, Exegesis, and Discourse Analysis, along with supervised consultant checking with various language teams. Judy has also developed and taught courses in OT Exegesis and in Hebrew Discourse. She holds an MA in Old Testament and recently completed the Doctor of Ministry in Bible Translation at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

Judy and her husband, Jeff, have worked in Chad (central Africa) since 1998. She worked as an exegete with a team translating the Old Testament into a major language of the region - the full Bible in that language was published in 2019. She now serves as the Translation Coordinator for SIL Chad. 

Discourse Analysis: Galatians as a Case Study
Stephen Levinsohn
Stephen Levinsohn's chapter on discourse analysis has just been published in Linguistics and New Testament Greek: Key Issues in the Current Debate (2020). This book is also available in Logos.

Abstract
The chapter begins by arguing for the importance of being aware of advances in discourse analysis in the wider linguistic scene, as we should expect proposals about discourse features of NT Greek to make sense in other languages, especially those in which aspect rather than tense is prominent. Five insights from other linguists are highlighted:

• Matthew Dryer’s SV/VS and SO/OV language types;
• Simon Dik’s constituent order template for VS languages;
• Relevance Theory claims about marked forms and added implicatures;
• the analysis of connectives in terms of the specific constraint that each one places on interpretation; and
• recent work on the perfect in context.

The chapter then outlines a series of methodological steps that a Bible scholar might follow when considering the discourse structure of the Greek text of a NT book, with each step illustrated from Galatians:

1. Determine the nature of the discourse [a letter];
2. Determine its broad genre [hortatory, rebuke];
3. Determine where there is a general consensus as to the major divisions of the texts, based on perceived changes of theme, and where exegetes disagree;
4. Look for surface features that support the different proposed divisions, in order to evaluate the relative merits of the conflicting proposals as to how the text should be divided;
5. Consider the implications of each inter-sentential conjunction used in the text;
6. Look for prominence-giving devices at various levels.

Part 3 (Macrostructure of a Letter) concentrates more specifically on Galatians. It first separates off the epistolary framework (introduction and closure) from its main body. It then proposes major divisions within the main body and evaluates evidence for a boundary at 1:12 versus 1:11, with flow-charts of 1:6-2:14 showing how the argument is affected by reading de or gar at 1:11. The final part discusses the internal structure of one of the macro-units proposed in part 3 (1:6-2:21), and includes a flow-chart of the argument of 1:11-2:14.

Preparing Translation Template
Ken Keyes
Katy Barnwell has created an Exegetical Workflow Template which Ken Keyes has shared on the TW Faithlife Group. The workflow will be split into two parts; Overview and Specifics. Feel free to email Ken with any questions you have. In TW Logos you can access the workflow template by:

• selecting Guides: Get more shared: workflows (at the bottom)

• Click on workflows, and a new panel will pop up: "Documents" 
• Choose > Groups: SIL Translator's Workplace.
• There you will see a workflow entitled "Preparing for Translation", listing "Ken" as the author:

Mentoring (online) Workshop Report
Michael Jemphrey
The first online Mentoring Workshop was held 21 August to 25 September 2020 for SIL Francophone Africa with 18 participants. 

• Instructors: Michael Jemphrey & Eszter Ernst
• Zoom support: Miranda Jemphrey
• Participant-facilitators: Cecile Sama, Jeff Heath, Andreas Ernst
• Duration: 18 hours over 6 weeks 
• Weekly structure: 90 minute Zoom sessions plus 90 minutes of independent study
• Language of instruction: French

Do mentoring relationships actually work? 
Typically three out of ten relationships do succeed. BUT if you train the mentors then that rises to six out of ten. AND if you train both mentors and mentees then the success rate rises dramatically to nine out ten! This startling research encouraged us to press forward with a pilot online training of mentors, despite our questions: 

• Would we be able to  make sufficient personal connections in an online environment? 
• Would the internet connections hold?

The result was a rich learning experience for staff and participants alike. Some key factors were: 

• A variety of learning tasks in groups of 2, 3 and 5 
• Support in prayer 
• Thorough preparation and teamwork 
• People willing to commit to three hours per week (half online in live zoom session and half offline)

TCDW 2021 - Registration Link
24 May to 11 June 2021
Donna T announces that TCDW 2021 (online) is now receiving applications. The next Asia Area Translation Consultant Development Workshop (TCDW) will be held in May and June 2021 online from India. The classroom portion will run for three weeks, 24 May to 11 June 2021. The practicum (supervised checking) will be coordinated at a later date, once there is clarity on travel restrictions.   

• Applications are now open. Consultants-in-Training are requested to register their details on this form.

A short History of Bible Translation video from the Seed Company. Today, we have unprecedented access to Scripture, but that wasn't always the case. God has been using Bible translation over the last 2,300 years to unify people around the world. 

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