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Contextualization and The Translation of The Scriptures
Contextualization and The Translation of The Scriptures
These are the transcriptions of a few of the lectures from the course taught by John A. Gration, Ph.D., at Wheaton Graduate School, 1991. Used by permission of Wheaton College.
Gration Chapter 2
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reformed, theres Anabaptist, and even varieties within those. So our Western culture is quite diverse. And we often dont realize how much our own culture has influenced the way we understand the Bible. In translation we have to be aware of our own culture and how its influencing us, so that when we put Gods message into another culture we can get rid of as many of those biases as possible. Gration: I suppose we in the West also tend to look at things from a very individualistic viewpoint without always realizing just how individualistic we are. Litteral: Thats right. Western culture is very individualistic and seems to be getting more that way, whereas other cultures are generally much more family oriented, more group oriented. I was reading this morning that in Africa they were trying to choose someone to race against another school. An American wanted to have a competition and choose the best runner. The Africans said, No, we would not do that. We will choose the runner, because if we competed with each other it would divide us and we would not be prepared to compete against other schools. They looked at it more as a group and they didnt want to hurt that unity. Gration: This brings up the fact that even in the receptor culture you find a certain element of diversity. Litteral: Thats right. First of all, there are the thousands of different cultures around the world. Even in a place like Papua New Guinea, along with a lot of similarities theres a lot of diversity. Even within the tribe or the group that were working with, the Angor, the people have different views of, lets say, what happens to the spirit after a person dies. So, even within one small tribe there can be differences of viewpoints. Gration: How does all this relate to translation? Litteral: When it comes to translation, our task is to take the message and make it as meaningful as possible in that culturethe receptor culture, as Nida calls itso that as they read the message or hear it read, they understand it as nearly as possible as the message was originally given to the people in the Bible times. Gration: If we want it to be like the Bible, why dont we just translate the Bible word for word and be really close to the original? Litteral: Some people have taken that approach at different times during the history of transla-
John A. Gration
We want to understand the Greek New Testament meaning and we want to get it as equal as possible into the language were translating intolets say, in Angor. We want the people to be able to understand it in their own language. You can say the formal equivalence method was focusing on the text itself. The overly free approach was really focusing on the audience. With dynamic equivalence we want to focus on both of them. Both of them are there to guide us as we translate. An example of that might be the Good News Bible, and I think the New International Version also tries to be dynamically equivalent. Gration: Can you give us an example of an English translation that focuses heavily on the source language, which I suppose would fit more the formal equivalency youve talked about? Litteral: All right. Lets look at something from the American Standard Version. Ill read 2 Corinthians 10:14-16, and this will give you a feeling of how difficult it is to understand even though all the words are English, when theyre sticking pretty close to the Greek. Listen to this: For we stretch not ourselves over much as though we reach not unto you, for we came even as far as unto you in the gospel of Christ, not glorifying beyond our measure, that is, in other mens labors, but having hope that as your faith groweth we shall be magnified in you according to our province unto further abundance, so as to preach the gospel even unto the parts beyond you, and not to glory in anothers province in regard to things already to our hand. You can see that is very difficult to understand. Gration: Sounds like all Greek to me, and I guess what youre saying is that thats part of the problem. In other words, I hear you saying that we cant be totally focused on the text, nor can we just focus on the audience. We really have to come up with both, dont we? Litteral: Yes. Look at the helpful chart which comes from Eugene Glassmans book on the translation debate, in which he shows this sort of relationship between these. On the left you see the formal equivalence, or correspondence, which focuses on the form of the words, and the meanings really lost or distorted, as I illustrated in that reading. On the other extreme, on the right, we have the paraphrase by addition, deletion, or changing of the message. In other words, somethings been left out, somethings been added, and its been changed so much that the message is not faithful. But in the middle are the good translations,
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what we call dynamic equivalents. The form is restructuredthat is, the grammar, the syntax, and the lexicon or the vocabulary have been restructuredbut they preserve the meaning of the original. Gration: As a translator, what are some basic things that you always have to keep in mind? Litteral: As I talk with people about translation, we keep coming back to three things: accuracy, naturalness, and clarity. Accuracy means that the meaning must be the same between the two languages. Were not free to put our own meaning in, to add it or subtract it. We want the total meaning to be the same, as much as possible, between the two languages. Natural means that it sounds like the language sounds. That passage I read to you didnt sound like English. It was a group of English words, but it was not English. Part of it was archaic, but even its grammar wasnt English. So we want a translation to sound as much as possible the way something sounds in that language, so that it doesnt really sound like something translated, but like something thats authored or created in that language. The third point is that we want it to be clear. Many times in our experiences, lets say in working with an archaic translation, we may have to read something several times to get the meaning. With a focus on clarity we want people to be able to understand it readily. They shouldnt have to read it three or four times and say, Oh, thats what it means. So accuracy, naturalness, and clarity: all are very important. Gration: Youve given us some pretty tough guidelines. How do you really go about doing it? What are the steps that you as a translator take in achieving this kind of goal? Litteral: We look at a number of steps. First, we have to analyze the text that were translating, that is, the original. Lets look at, say, the Greek New Testament. We have to analyze it to understand what it is saying. This is where exegesis comes in. We look at the historical background, the ideas of the time, the grammar. We look at all of these together, and then we analyze the text, and we understand what the meaning is, and we get that into as simple a form as we can. Gration: So youre saying that a Bible translator must be more than just a good linguist. He really has to be a Bible student. Is that right? Litteral: Very much so. In fact, after translators have the language under their belt, a lot of their
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time goes to the area of exegesis: really what does this mean? Much time goes into that. Gration: Where do we go from there? Weve figured out what Paul meant when he wrote to the Romans in the first century. Now were working on the Angor. Whats the next step? Litteral: The next thing we do is to transfer this meaning. In the analysis step we try to get that as simple as we can. Lets say working in English, we get that into simple form; then we transfer this meaning across into the Angor language. The transfer involves restructuring it and making the meaning come out into the structure of the Angor language. We call this restructuring. So there are the three steps. Look at the diagram of this. We start with the original text. We analyze that so weve got its underlying meaning, and that is what we transfer across. But then we have to put that into the language of the Angor. So we come back to the forms of the language, and that we call the restructuring part. Gration: In that restructuring, you must go through some process of analysis. What do you really analyze in the process? Litteral: We talk about semantic analysis. Semantics is a technical term for the analysis of meaning. We look at words and we have to discover their semantic parts. In semantics we talk about four things. We say there are objects: trees and houses, fingers and people. There are events, things that people do: we sit, we stand, we walk, we sleep. Then there are attributes or qualities: we say someone is good or we say the ball is yellow or the sky is blue. Those are attributes. Then we have relations. We add things together (and) or we say hes in the house or its on the table. These four things ordinarily come out with a one-to-one relationship in the grammar. Lets say objects often come out as nouns. Events come out as verbs. Attributes or qualities, whichever you call them, come out as adjectives. Relational things come out as prepositions (in, out) or conjunctions (and, but, although). The problem comes when this relationship is not quite so simple. Gration: When is that? It seems to me that if you have a noun in Greek to be translated, why dont you translate it as a noun where you are? Why cant you just have an equivalent translation? Litteral: Lets take one of our favorite verses. We talk about being saved by grace. We need
John A. Gration
redemption is. In Angor that would be the way it would come. Instead of saying redemption we would have to talk about God making us free. Gration: So you take a noun and turn it into an event with an attribute and an object. Is this structural or semantic analysis the only kind of analysis that you do in restructuring? Litteral: No. We need also to look at the vocabulary, at the connotations and the denotations of words, whereas before we were looking at the components and structure. Most words, probably all words, have several kinds of meaning. One is denotation: what does a word denote? Its analytical. Lets take the word woman. What does it denote? You could say a woman is an adult female. Thats analytical but it doesnt have much connotation. Now lets take a word like lady. We could say a lady is also an adult female. But the word also has positive connotations. We have warm feelings about the lady, so we say there are connotations there. Anytime were translating we have to be careful to take both denotation and connotation into consideration. Its not just getting the bare facts. What is the emotive meaning as well? Another example would be mother. For us, mother is going to have warm emotional connotations. But if we said, My female parent is living in Ohio, that doesnt have much warm connotation. Its analytical, scientific. It has correct denotation but it doesnt have the connotation, the emotional meaning. Gration: Give us an example now of how all this relates to translation. Litteral: All right. Lets look at why the word choice is very important. An example comes from John 1:11-12. As we translated that, we started off on our own. Its a very meaningful verse talking about our receiving Christ. At first we took a very prosaic approach and looked for the word receive, and we had a word for receive. If someone gives me a ball or gives me some food to eat, I receive it. So I tried that word: lets receive Christ; but that didnt even get to first base. We struck out, because you receive things, but you cant receive people. So that showed us that when translating you always have to be interacting with the people to see what a word really means to them. The next thing that came up in discussion was a word meaning to receive in your house. That basically means to house someone. It means literally to put them to the house. I thought, boy, that is good! The idea is that visitors come through and you welcome them
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into your house and you befriend them and you take care of their needs. Its like when we go out and stay in the village; we stay in the pastors house; he would do that for us. We thought, thats it! But that wasnt quite it either. We got to discussing that and they said, Thats sort of temporary. So that didnt have quite the right connotation. Finally what the mother tongue translator came up with, which is whats been accepted, literally means you take to your skin, which means you take in a permanent relationship. This means someone becomes a part of the community. And so it comes out in Angor that to become a Christian, or to receive Christ, is to make him a part of you as if you were receiving someone into your community or into your family, as if you adopted someone. Gration: That shows the value again of having nationals work with you, and thats the very heart and essence of Wycliffes work. Let me ask you: in this instance you found the right word after you fumbled around several times, and you got the best onebut what do you do when there is no word? Litteral: Again we have to go back to the community and talk with them. The thing I would start out with is saying, by story, by explanation, this is what I want to try to get. Lets take, for example, the word God. Now, this is a big problem, especially in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, where we work, because most of those cultures do not have a concept of a supreme being. Most cultures do, but these dont. There are several ways we can approach it. The first thing I would do would be to talk with the leaders, the people, and say this is who God is. Maybe we could translate Genesis, tell them the stories of Genesis, creation, and ask, Do you have anyone like this? They said, No. So the first thing we do is look for a local term. If weve got it, thats fine. If we dont, we have to try another alternative. The second alternative is, can we create a new term or phrase? In some cases this has been done, and its strongly to be encouraged if theres no indigenous term. Some have used the creator or the supreme one or the one who lives above in heaven. But this is not the way the Angor chose to go. They chose a third alternative, what we call borrowing, and in that case they chose to use the word Got, which is borrowed from English into Pidgin English, because that is what the missions in the area
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are using. So they take basically an empty term that has very little meaning to them, and by stories and by communication they build meaning into it. Gration: What do they do with the word spirit? Litteral: This is one of the problems we run into. There is no generic term that covers for spirit. They have lots of names for different kinds of spirits: theres a bush spirit; theres one that lives in water holes, one that lives in caves, some that live in the sky. But theres no general term for spirit. What they came up with is a general term which means being. For evil spirits they would say bad beings. For angels they tried several thingsagain this is going back to the communityand basically they settled on a term that means Gods beings, Gods cohorts, Gods friends. Gration: Thats a beautiful way of putting it. Almost contrary to popular opinion theres even in the Greek a little ambiguity now and then; it doesnt clarify and solve all of our questions. How do you handle ambiguous terms or constructions when you get into a receptor language? Litteral: This is fascinating and this is where the challenge of translation comes. To give an example: in Angor you cant say brother. Many languages in the world are like this. That is, you have to talk about an older brother or a younger brother; theres no one term. When you look at it from the receptor language viewpoint, the Greek is ambiguous when it says James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. What kind of brother is it? Theres no word in Angor that just says brother, so we have to know if John is Jamess older brother or younger brother. The Greek doesnt tell us, but we cant leave it ambiguous. Theres no way in the language just to leave it. We have to make a choice. So what we do is to start by looking at the culture and trying to understand a little more about the New Testament. (By the way, commentaries dont help us in these cases because its not a question for Western cultures.) Basically what weve found out is that in Hebrew culture the older brother is the most important, and the names of important people are given first. So when a Gospel writer talks about James and his brother, John, we assume that James is the older because his name is mentioned first. So it comes across as James, the son of Zebedee, and his younger brother, John. Gration: Even in our English translations, if we might come back to that for a moment, we
John A. Gration
Litteral: Thats true, and it cant be emphasized enough that there is no one translation thats right and another ones wrong. We need to keep in consideration who its for and the method of translating. Gration: When we were discussing the matter of finding an appropriate word, you said you went back to the community. Maybe you could conclude by discussing briefly the role of the community or the role of the church, as it comes into existence, in translation. How important is this? What is the dynamic relationship between translation and the emerging church? Litteral: Youll see a chart that shows the church at the top with an arrow slanting down to translation, and then from translation another arrow feeding back into the church. This is a crucial part of translation that some people miss. Someone sent in a letter, I think, to Wycliffe that said, I cant go and translate, but if youll send me a dictionary, then I will translate the Scriptures for these people and give it to them. Thats a very simple idea of translation. The weakness there is that translation isnt just a one-way process. There has to be feedback. So, as I said before, were going to the community constantly to find out how they understand it. The role of translation is going to people, and they need to be actively involved. What happens, as happened in Angor, is that the translation was there, it was read, and then it went to the church. As the church grew they would preach and then they would select certain terms. For instance, at first they wanted to use a term for baptism which meant to dunk. Thats the first thing they saw: you put a person under the water. When they began to understand more what was involved with it, they looked at it more as washing because that had more ritual meaning, and so they used the word to wash. That came from the church. The translations feed into the church, giving them more understanding of what Gods Word says. Then the church itself, as it communicates that orally in discussion, selects many times an alternate way of communicating, and it feeds back into the translation. That is the crucial process.
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Gration: So youre saying that the translation grows with the church and, in a very real sense, the church grows with the translation, so that theres a dynamic interaction. Litteral: Thats right. That is the ideal way for a translation to take place, both of them growing together. Gration: And thats why you mentioned the use of nationals as more than helpers. They are real partners. Litteral: Thats right. As I see it, the mother tongue translator, the national working with us, is the prime person, the most important person. We are helping him to understand it, but he is the most crucial one. The one that has the pencil or pen in his hand doing the translation is crucial, and if that can be a mother tongue or national translator, that is better. And of course, he is interacting with the church. He is preaching, he is discussing with them, he is hearing what they are saying, and he knows the culture much, much better than we do. So he adds a lot of richness to the translation. We are not only helping him to translate, but we are also developing a person, a leader. Gration: Youve been devoting a good part of your time, apparently, to developing these mother tongue translators. It must be a very rich and rewarding experience to see them begin to emerge and do some of the things you were trained to do. Litteral: Yes. Probably the primary task of us expatriates is enabling the people there to do the task that formerly we did, because they can do it better. And we also want to be building the community. That is where most of my efforts are going now. Gration: Thank you, Dr. Litteral. Certainly translation is the epitome and the essence of contextualization. Im sure weve all sensed that its an exciting and a rewarding field of ministry to make Gods living Word available and understandable to a people for the first time. Im sure we have sensed also that its not an easy task but a privileged one, and we thank you, Dr. Litteral, for this time thats been very insightful and informative and also inspiring.