MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tbtd/76/2

This issue of The Bible Translator celebrates the seventy-five years since the first issue, edited by Eugene A. Nida, in 1950. As editors today, we feel very honoured to belong to this story.

In the editorial, TBT’s managing editor, Jeffrey Green, provides an up-to-date record of our history, some of the changes the journal has been through, and the many things that have stayed the same. Then we share some of the words of greeting and congratulation that TBT has received from the leadership of UBS and of several closely related journals in French, Spanish, Korean, and English.

This issue’s range of papers may itself say something about the history of TBT and of Bible translation work more broadly. The first issue included contributions by Nida, Metzger, and others, all American, British, and Dutch. Seventy-five years on, we have a similar number of contributions, but by colleagues from Australia, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Finland, Ghana, Indonesia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, and the US. This breadth, not only of Bible translation work itself, but of Bible translation scholarship too, surely gives us much to celebrate! As for the progress of Bible translations themselves, we note that our first issue carried a paper on a “new Dutch translation of the Bible.” Since that translation appeared in 1951, the Netherlands Bible Society has published three more Dutch Bible translations!

Several papers in this issue address specific local translation issues. Rhoneil Arevalo argues for a translation of the biblical Psalms which does more justice to poetic features both of the Masoretic Hebrew source text and the Tagalog target language and literature. Brenda Boerger does something similar with English traditional poetic forms, also introducing us to her own English translation of the entire Psalter, which aims to be sensitive both to the semantics and pragmatics of the Hebrew and to the singability of the translation to traditional English hymn tunes. Similarly concerned for Christian use of the Bible, Isaac Ampong argues for a revision of certain terms used in the Asante Twi translation of the Eph 5–6 household code, which may have significant pastoral consequences for Ghanaian Christians today.

Karolina J. Zaremba’s historical research seeks to discover the use made of Hebrew, Spanish, and Dutch sources in Almeida’s seventeenth/eighteenth-century Portuguese translation by looking at hapaxes in Job; the results suggest that he worked more independently of the Spanish Reina-Valera translation than is sometimes thought, and that later revisions assimilated the text to the Dutch Statenvertaling. Back in the present, Daud Soesilo presents the Bible Society of Malaysia’s simultaneous launch of two Malay translations—one formally equivalent, the other a study edition of the existing functionally equivalent translation—as two “windows” on the biblical text, usefully read together.

Norm Mundhenk exposes a wide range of different types of implicit information in biblical texts which may need to be made explicit in translation in certain languages and cultures; some cautions then relate to things which are deliberately left implicit in the text and should perhaps be so in translation too.

Several colleagues have provided book reviews. Fausto Liriano reviews Hardy and Carroll’s The State of Old Testament Studies, Seppo Sipilä Carbajosa’s Does a Canonical Text of the Old Testament Exist?, Matthijs de Jong Biver-Pettinger and Shuali’s multilingual volume Traduire la Bible—Hier et aujourd’hui (Translating the Bible—Past and present) on translation into European and Semitic languages, Sam Freney Judd’s Modern Genre Theory: An Introduction for Biblical Studies, and Stephen Pattemore Abubakar’s The Bible and Sustainability on ecology.

We trust that our readers will agree that in its old age The Bible Translator is as strong as ever, with a vitality and diversity that does honour to the global and interdisciplinary character of today’s Bible translation scholarship and practice.

Andy Warren-Rothlin
Marijke de Lang