The Bible Translator: Volume 66, Issue 3

Biblical performance criticism (BPC) is a provincial practice with particular North American and European historical indices. When entering into a new context, this methodological genealogy needs to be recognized, because within those indices overt and covert interests are served. In order for BPC to be contextualized to serve local interests, it must recognize practices on the ground and how those practices have already been shaped or reshaped to serve local interests. I will highlight three practices in the Bikɔɔm context of Ghana to see how their ideological pathways have been (re)shaped to serve local interests: written Bible translation, oral tradition, and preaching. I will discuss two examples where written Bible translation has partially imitated the pathways of oral tradition and sermonic practice to better serve local interests. Then I will discuss the material dimensions of written Bibles and oral tradition as instructive for the way BPC materially contextualizes. Finally, I will suggest that if contextual Bible study as developed in South Africa could be adapted for the Bikɔɔm context, it could be helpful to Bible interpreters, translators, and performers as they seek to embed their Bible practices in locally controlled ways that foster local liberation. View Less

From the perspective of Peircean semiotics, people who experience a performed discourse—for example, one that is spoken, sung, and gestured—experience that discourse as a more direct, “real,” and affective experience than when they experience that same discourse by reading it. This distinction is so because performed discourse typically engages many more iconic and indexical sign-object semioses than does read discourse. Therefore, Bible translators who translate written biblical discourse for the express purpose of making that discourse accessible through cultural performance are obliged, first, to discover the distinct, genre-specific, iconic, and indexical performance features of their receptor language and second, champion the inclusion of those performance features in their translation. As a case study of this kind of translation, this article describes the manner in which translators of the Baka Bible translation project in Cameroon translated select passages from the book of Revelation for spoken and sung narrative performance. View Less

Relevance theory (RT) describes human communication as a cognitive process that tends to maximize contextual effects while minimizing processing effort. From an RT perspective, translation is a communication event in which a speaker/writer selects some contextual effects of a prior communication event to replicate with an acceptable amount of processing effort by new hearers in a different language. Performance is translation in that it shares the goal of replication of contextual effects; but while translators may desire verisimilitude above other goals, performers may have differently prioritized communicative objectives. Performance of a text provides Bible translators an opportunity to explore the effectiveness of verbal and non-verbal cues to maximize contextual effects and minimize processing effort for a specific audience. The performance of Revelation 17–19 offers a unique window into the cognitive effects of ambiguity and delayed processing, emotion and tone, space and distance that guide word choice, syntax, and visual formatting of a written translation. The non-verbal cues of performance correlate to the visual cues of a text in maximizing desired contextual effects while minimizing processing effort. View Less

The article presents an introduction to issues of Deaf identity, especially in relation to performance in Bible translation into sign languages. Deaf people become visible as Deaf at the moment they start to speak their language. The communicative performance of sign language is what gives them their identity as Deaf persons. In an intersemiotic translation, the translator-signer presents three visible layers of identities: one is him- or herself as a Deaf person, the other two are the narrator and the characters represented in the text. To achieve an acceptable translation, the translator must choose the most relevant strategies regarding these identities; otherwise, the translation becomes vulnerable to the criticism of the Deaf community because, in the translation, the first of these identities is visibly attached to the signer’s own personal identity, including his or her physical appearance and ethical behavior. View Less

This article presents an approach to the book of Revelation from the perspective of translation as embodied performance. The performance is based on a specific hermeneutical framework from the Caribbean perspective of creolité, resulting in the actual performance of two passages (“Babylon has fallen” and “the New Jerusalem comes down”) in Papiamentu, a Creole language of the region. Thus, a modern Caribbean audience is challenged to engage with the text orally in relevant matters of oppression and the forging of a collective identity through the visions of John, the Seer. A brief sociocultural analysis of the book of Revelation and concrete performance criteria result in a basic script for audiovisual presentation. Ultimately, translation itself is a form of performance and performance is a form of translation. The preparation of the text and the actual performance open the door to a more concrete appropriation of the text through orality. View Less

This article aims to establish that a Bible team translating the Bible in a minority language can have the same level of quality as a translation carried out by a large, well-funded team in a national language. In order to validate this claim, the article first looks at the criteria of a good-quality translation, and then investigates how these criteria are affected by the different contexts in which Bible translation takes place. The final conclusion states what conditions must be met in minority Bible translation projects to achieve good-quality translations. View Less

The article documents two Bible translation projects in the Philippines that took longer than usual to finish. The Pampango Bible took twenty-four years, and the Bolinao New Testament took thirty-five years. Accelerated change in the society generated changes in language preference with Tagalog competing with Pampango. From thirty barangays (the smallest political unit) in the 1970s that spoke Bolinao, this has been reduced to only six. Reasons cited are: easy access by land on the part of the Ilocanos; transport routes that once were by sea are now primarily by land, with good roads from the town of Bolinao to Manila; and a new bridge bringing an end to the isolation of the island towns of Anda and Santiago. One obvious sign of language endangerment is that young children are now unable to speak Bolinao, and only those in their fifties or sixties use Bolinao with ease. View Less

Translating the tetragrammaton and the appellations associated with it poses a challenge for most of the minority-language Bible translation projects in China and Taiwan. All the translation teams adopt a Chinese Bible version as the model text. The various Chinese versions handled the divine name in different ways, each with its own complications. The Seediq translation team in Taiwan could not find a suitable solution from the various Bible versions they consulted. They looked into their own cultures and found a creative solution. View Less

This paper identifies a collection of “proverb-like” sayings found in the Greek New Testament and analyzes some of the grammatical and phonological features that characterize the collection. It then exemplifies the translation of several of these sayings into the Nsenga language as Nsenga proverbs, following the literary functional-equivalence (LiFE) approach described by E. R. Wendland. It is hoped that these “LiFE-like” Nsenga translations can serve as models for the translation of biblical proverbs into appropriate local literary forms in languages around the world. View Less