From: Stevens, Charles C (Charles.Stevens@unisys.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 1997 - 11:38:20 EDT
On June 24, at 6:59PM, Andrew Kulikovsky wrote:
<<So what do the real linguists on this list say? Can you translate
without interpreting?>>
My personal opinion (based on a thirty-year-old BA in Linguistics) is a
resounding NO. Exact and absolute one-to-one correspondences between
(any) two languages in either vocabulary or syntax are very, very rare.
Moreover, in text that has multiple "layers" of meaning, multiple
legitimate interpretations in the original language, it is virtually
impossible to retain all the semantics of the original. A wag once
likened the task of translating Scriptures into English to attempting to
translate the script of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show into Swahili,
maintaining all the literal meaning of everything in the script while
simultaneously carrying all the puns into that target language, without
doing any violence whatever to either one. While that might be an
overstatement for the NT, I'm not sure it is for the OT ...
EVERY translation is an interpretation, by definition.
-Chuck Stevens [SMTP: Charles.Stevens@unisys.com]
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