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and another DE thing
Perhaps this is hopelessly simplistic, but I have never understood
Dynamic Equivalency theory to mean Paul's letters should be translated
as though they were WRITTEN TO the target language readers (the Cotton
Patch Version does that: translates the Jew-Greek passages into
Black-White, for example). Similarly, I don't believe that poems and
other non-'how-to' literature should be distilled into propositionally based
functional equivalents. Rather, I think, for example, that Paul's
letters would be translated in such a way that they were recognizable
AS letters (e.g. Dear Corinthians...In Christ, Paul), and poems AS
poems (a little harder, I admit).
Furthermore, the content that was discernible to the original
readers should be similarly discernible to the target language readers
(e.g. Corinth translated as 'the city of Corinth,' camel (for other
cultures where they are unknown) as 'an desert animal called camel',
etc. Clearly there is a line to be drawn, between making implicit
info explicit and unnecessarily disambiguating interpretations better
left implicit, but that must be done by all translators. Here's a
maxim in translation theory: ALL translation is paraphrase.
Another thought: I can't believe the problems inherent in translating
from one language to the next are insurmountable, especially when
compared with the problem of translating the mind of God into human
language. A linguistics professor I had at Bethel (Donald N. Larson)
used to say, "In the Bible, God tells us enough about himself to clear
up important misconceptions."
Mari Broman Olsen
Northwestern University
Department of Linguistics
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
molsen@astrid.ling.nwu.edu
molsen@babel.ling.nwu.edu