Beating a dead metaphor

Here's an email I received from one of the readers of my Lingamish blog [Some details removed]:

Dear Friend in Christ, Greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! I have been going through the studies at your web site, and I am deeply inspired with all of the teachings and studies thereon like Bible studies, sermons, children's sermons and other teaching materials on our Web site. This is such a wonderful studies you have arranged for all the nations, in the long run of your service for the nations of the all the world. I am from [a politically/religiously repressive country] where it is difficult to have Radio and TV channel for preaching purposes. They would not allow us to do that here; the Satan has real strong hold over everything. I often say that we are living in the land of the enemy. Friend, I humbly request you to expand your outreach your program in [a language] and [another] language. [...]I would ask you to pray and share it among the brethren. I would offer my services for being translator, recorder and distribution/sales. I pray that your consideration will have His mark over your decision. May God bless you abundantly! May His perfect will be done! Grace and Peace be with you, all brethrens. Yours brother in Christ, [Name removed]

Notice anything wrong here? While you can only applaud this man's desire to translate my witty blog into the languages of his home country, I can guarantee that the result wouldn't be anything like my blog. It is entirely possible that this isn't just some devious huckster trying to flatter me and then make a buck. Maybe he did read my blog and see nothing but spiritually uplifting "Bible studies, sermons, children's sermons and other teaching materials." But the truth is he missed the point. He didn't get the joke.

And if the joke's on him, I'm afraid that the same can be said of some of us Bible bloggers who have been blogging ourselves blue in the face on 1 Corinthians 9:27. If the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath is "Do no harm" then the first rule of translation should be George Orwell's: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." Yet most of the suggestions I'm seeing so far are barbarous. And  barbarous for the simple reason that they're mixing dead metaphors.

The word in question is this one: ὑπωπιάζω. (hupopiazo) This word has a fantastic etymology: hupo-op-piazo "hit under the eye." Unfortunately we only have two occurrences of the word in the New Testament:

For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ” (Luke 18:4-5, NRSV)

So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:26-27, NRSV)

The reason this word gets used in such different contexts is that the word is a dead metaphor, or "semantically bleached" (I've always wanted to use that phrase on a blog). And further proof of this is that Paul collocates it with "body" which would really be strange: "I hit myself on the face my body." Finally, this is just a small word in a big mixed metaphor that rambles through chapters 9 and 10 and includes slavery, boxing, athletic training and yoga. Well, maybe not yoga. But I hear John Hobbins found some yoga in this passage so it must be there.

This is one of those cases where we as translators just have to laugh at ourselves and say, "Gee, I don't really know how to bring in the meaning of ὑπωπιάζω into my translation, but I can at least make sure I don't say anything barbarous." And that is what English translators have been doing far into the distant past when they all walked around wearing powdered wigs. KJV and all the rest simply say "discipline" and who am I to contradict such an illustrious crowd?

For another example of Paul's use of mixed metaphors, see 1 Timothy 1:18-20.

Well, this is my first ever post on BBB and I deserve a good beating for it I'm sure. But right now I'm hungry so I'm going to head over to the all-you-can-eat buffet.

translation equivalence - possession #3

If this is the first post in this series that you have read, please be sure to read preceding posts. They contain background information which will help you understand this post better.

We now begin looking at biblical examples expressing possession as we examine translation equivalence.

In a previous post in this series we noted that the semantics of relationship (e.g. his daughter) is usually expressed the same grammatically in English as is the semantics of possession (e.g. his boat). In fact, for study of Greek, some consider the genitive of relationship (e.g. ho huios tou theou, lit. 'the son of God') to be a subset of the genitive of possession. In Biblical Hebrew both semantic relationships are encoded by the same set of possessive suffixes.

The Hebrew of Gen. 2:24 with a morpheme-by-morpheme(1) interlinear translation is:

עַלכֵּן        יַעֲזָב-אִישׁ
man-leave-he    therefore

אֶת-אָבִיו          וְאֶת-אִמּוֹ
mother-his-and   father-his-and

וְדָבַק         בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ
wife-his-to   cleaves-he-and

וְהָיוּ    לְבָשָׂר   אֶחָד
one   flesh   become-they-and

I have highlighted the possessed nouns and their possessive suffixes in red.

While Hebrew uses possessive suffixes, Cheyenne (the language I have been studying for many years) uses possessive prefixes. If we translate this verse from Hebrew to Cheyenne, translation equivalence requires that the form changes, from Hebrew possessive suffixes to Cheyenne possessive prefixes, but the meaning stays the same.

Greek uses a third kind of form, the genitive case, to indicate possession. Here is the Septuagint (LXX) translation of Gen. 2:24 with an interlinear translation:

ἕνεκεν       τούτου   καταλείψει      ἄνθρωπος
because.of   this    leave-he-will   person/man

τὸν  πατέρα   αὐτοῦ   καὶ  τὴν  μητέρα   αὐτοῦ
the  father  him.of  and  the  mother  him.of

καὶ προσκολληθήσεται   πρὸς  τὴν  γυναῖκα     αὐτοῦ,
and cleave.to-he-will  unto the  woman/wife  him.of

καὶ  ἔσονται            οἱ     δύο  εἰς  σάρκα  μίαν.
and  become-they-will  those  two  for flesh  one

(I highlighted the genitives of possession in red.)

The translators of the LXX used a different Greek form (genitive case) to express the same meaning that the original Hebrew had expressed with possessive suffixes on nouns. That is translation equivalence.

English uses yet a fourth way to indicate possession, separate words called pronouns. (We write them as separate words, but they often are pronounced as prefixes to the noun they modify. So English, like many other languages, has a difference between orthographic words and what we can call phonological words.)

Here is an English translation of the Hebrew of Gen. 2:24:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. (NASB)

(I highlighted the English possessive pronouns in red.)

The NASB translators used different forms (possessive pronoun words) than the possessive suffixes of the original Hebrew, but kept the meaning the same, resulting in translation equivalence. Translators of all other English Bibles that I have examined do the same as the NASB translators did. They all use possessive pronouns instead of forcing the Hebrew syntax of possessive suffixes upon English. Using the Hebrew syntax with English words and affixes would not give us English translation equivalence. It would not be natural English to use Hebrew syntax with English words.

I think everyone can clearly see how obvious the English translation equivalents are when we deal with the examples of the possessive syntax of Gen. 2:24. Yet too many Bible translators have forced Hebrew (or Aramaic or Greek) syntax upon English for other kinds of grammatical forms in other passages of the Bible. And we Bible users often affirm them for doing so, thinking that somehow we are honoring the "words" of the Bible better doing so. In our next post we'll look at some biblical examples where English translation equivalence may not be so obvious to everyone.

(to be continued)

P.S. If any of you spot any errors in my interlinear glossing, please let me know by private email so that I can correct them. I don't want discussion in the comments of my glossing errors to detract from the main translation points of this post.

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(1) A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. The English word "cats" has two morphemes, "cat" plus the suffix "-s" which means plural. In the interlinear translation a hyphen indicates a morpheme break within a Hebrew word. Not all morpheme boundaries are marked in the Hebrew here.

translation equivalence - possession #2

Thank you to each one who commented on the preceding post in this series. Information from the comments is critical to what we need to discuss next, which is how do we translate instances of semantic possession to English translation equivalents.

As always, to review, a translation equivalent is how speakers of a target (translation) language actually express the meaning of a form in a source language. By "meaning" we are referring to "rich" meaning, that is meaning which is referential, connotational, rhetorical, figurative, etc. In both the source and target languages, the forms used to express rich meaning are essential. It is the forms themselves, plus inferences we draw from them (a la Relevance Theory), that are the vehicles by which we communicate meaning to one another.

In our preceding post we introduced English possessive syntax which is the usual grammatical form to communicate the semantics of simple possession. English possessive syntax for nouns consists of an apostrophe plus the letter "s" added to the end of a word which refers to a person who is the possessor, that is, the person who is considered to "own" some object as in:

"Sally's sister"
"Bill's computer"

Blog reader correctly noted that English speakers sometimes use an "of" prepositional phrase to express possession and gave these examples:

-"Son of Sam" killer
-"children of a lesser god"
-"son of a preacher-man"

We could add a couple of others such as:

daughters of the American Revolution
son of the South

When a language has more than one syntactic form to express a meaning (in this case, possession), we always need to ask: When do we use each form? What is the difference between them?

Rich Rhodes noted in a comment that the "of" prepositional phrases are "marked". "Marked" is a technical linguistic term referring to a form which is somehow unique, special, out of the ordinary.

By far, possession in English is most commonly encoded with possessive (apostrophe-s) syntax. Whenever we come across an "of" phrase encoding possession, we sense that there is something special about it. It stands out as unusual from the "unmarked" (normal, default) possessive syntax with apostrophe-s. It could easily take an entire Ph.D dissertation (as Rich noted in his comment on the preceding post) to describe English possessives. Including in that research should be study of the contexts in which "of" possessives are preferred over apostrophe-s possessives. My beginning hypothesis is that phrases such as "son of Sam" and "daughters of the American Revolution" have some greater literary or cognitive salience than do possessives expressed with apostrophe-s.

Notice how bland "Sam's son" sounds compared to "son of Sam". "Sam's son" could refer to any son of any man named Sam and we would not think that anything of special consequence is going to be said about this Sam's son. But saying "son of Sam" catches our attention, since it is the less common way of expressing English possessive. And, indeed, the Sam of "son of Sam" had a very unique "father" relationship to psychologically tortured serial killer, David Berkowitz.

If I spot some blood on our floor after our grandchildren have been playing (our grandsons like to wrestle), I can ask my wife, "Whose blood is that?" If she saw what caused the blood to get on the floor, she would answer with something like:

Jonah's.
Oh, it's Jonah's blood.
It's Jonah's.

She would never say, and I suggest most other English speakers would never say, either:

Oh, it's the blood of Jonah.

The appropriate response uses the normal, unmarked apostrophe-s syntax, not an "of" prepositional phrase.

Similarly, if I wonder which of our grandchildren left their mitten on our living room floor, I can ask: "Whose mitten is that?" Appropriate responses could be:

Talea's
It's Talea's.
It's Talea's mitten.

But it would not be appropriate to use the marked "of" phrase:

It's the mitten of Talea.

Someone *could* use the "of" phrase. But it would not be good English. It would not be the proper syntax for this situation.

And that gets us back to Bible translation. As I've noted before, when trying to find a translation equivalent for a source text expression, we should not ask: "Could we say it this way in English?" but, rather, "How would it be said in this context in English?" This requires very careful attention to how the various kinds of English syntax are used in different contexts. There is just as much English scholarship needed for Bible translation as there is biblical language scholarship.

Well, it looks like I've filled up the message buffer of the blog editor and still have not gotten to discussion of translation of biblical examples of translation equivalence for possession. And that's OK. We need to establish the background information necessary for being able to properly discuss translation of the biblical forms. It is so important when doing Bible translation that we not only pay full attention to the language forms of a source text, but that we also are aware of all of the forms of a target language and when each is properly used. Too often Bible translators have paid insufficient attention to the linguistics of English when translating to English from the biblical languages. The result has been Bibles which are technically inaccurate since they communicate wrong or distorted meanings, such as wrong meanings communicated by using the marked "of" possessive syntax when the unmarked apostrophe-s syntax should have been used.

Oh, as I awakened too early this morning with thoughts about this post running through my brain, I realized that all translation (whether biblical or not) is an incarnational act. In translation to any language the meanings of the forms of a source text (such as the written Word of scripture) take on the human flesh (form) of yet another language.

This process requires great humility, partly because we need to be patient to search for appropriate translation equivalents, which communicate full, rich meaning of the forms of the original written Word. And when we discover those forms, we need to humbly submit to them in kenotic (Philippians 2) fashion. We must resist the temptation of linguistic colonialism that forces source text syntax on to the target language where it doesn't belong. None of us would be so foolish as to try to change a rose into a carnation. We recognize that both are beautiful. All linguistic forms of every language are, in some sense, beautiful. Our job as Bible translators, women and men alike, is to let their unique beauty shine forth, without being forced into some other linguistic mold.

(to be continued)

translation equivalence - possession

Before we look at biblical examples of translation equivalence for possession, let's review what would be standard, natural ways of indicating possession or ownership in English. By possession we mean that something is owned by someone. Here are some English examples that come to my mind:

our dog
John's blog
Peter's house
my car
Suzanne's son
Dan's father
Mike's children
our daughters

We might wonder whether or not the last four examples indicate possession or something else. Good question. Suzanne doesn't really "own" her son, not does Dan "own" his father, nor Mike his children, nor do my wife and I "own" our daughters. A kinship relationship is grammatically indicated in English (and some other languages) using the same syntax as that used for possession. For now, let's simply agree to say that possession and kinship relationship are both encoded by possessive syntax in English.

Note that we can also talk in English about:

Rich's book

Here, outside of enough context, we do not know if the meaning (semantics) is that Rich owns the book or that he authored it, or, neither, but that it is the book which Rich happens to be reading at the time. In English, we use possessive syntax to encode each of these semantic relationships.

OK, before we look at biblical examples of possession or kinship relationship or authorship, let's find out if we're all on the same page.

Does anyone disagree with what I have said so far about the examples above being natural, good quality English?

Can you think of any other ways that fluent speakers of standard dialects of English grammatically indicate possession, kinship, or authorship?

translation equivalence - in the Bible

In previous posts in this series we have introduced the concept of translation equivalence. We have given a number of examples of translation equivalents between languages where literal translation isn't proper, when one follows the rules of both the source and target languages. Many people accept this to be true about languages they have studied ...

except when it comes to Bible translation!

Look at this example:

Some critics of the TNIV dissed it for revising Matthew 1:18 from NIV:

she [Mary] was found to be with child

to

she was found to be pregnant

in the TNIV. The TNIV properly uses a common English translation equivalent for the underlying Greek, eurethe en gastri eksousa, literally,

she was found in the belly having

or with more natural English word order,

she was found having in the belly

But English speakers today do not usually say that a woman is "with child". The NIV and other translations (KJV, RSV, ESV, NASB) which use that outdated phrase are not using a current translation equivalent. The HCSB and TNIV both use the word which is commonly used, "pregnant".

By the way, those who objected to the TNIV's not using "with child" cannot be objecting on the basis of literal translation since "with child" does not literally translate the Greek idiom "have in the belly". There is no word for "child" in the Greek text. There is just a tradition of saying "with child" in English Bibles in the KJV-Tyndale tradition. But tradition does not determine accuracy, naturalness, nor translation equivalence. Objective attention to the linguistic facts of the biblical languages and equal attention to the linguistic facts of a target language determine accuracy and naturalness. The result will be translation equivalence.

Next let's look at specific categories of translation equivalence when translating the Bible to English.

(to be continued)

translation equivalence - introduction #2

(This is the second post in my series on translation equivalence. Be sure to read the first post for background information.)

Sometimes an idiom in one language can have a different idiom in another language as a translation equivalent. Cheyennes say, "Nato'semhaeto ho'honaa'e," literally, "I'm going to swallow a rock." One possible English translation equivalent is the idiom, "I'm going to stick to my guns." Another would be the English idiom, "I'm not going to back down." As with all idioms, the meaning of the Cheyenne idiom has nothing to do, literally, with the meaning of its parts. The meaning of the Cheyenne idiom has nothing to do with swallowing or rocks. A literal translation of the Cheyenne idiom, therefore, is not a translation equivalent, since a translation equivalent, by definition, must match meanings between two languages.

Anyone who has studied a language beside their own knows that many wordings between the two languages do not match up word for word, or even the same words in different orders. To speak or write a language well, it is necessary to express concepts in that language the way that social conventions have determined those things are worded in that language. To be a fluent speaker of a language you must follow the syntactic and lexical rules of that language. To translate properly, we need to match equivalent form-meaning composites, as the late tagmemicist, Ken Pike, would have said. The meanings of the forms must match for there to be translation equivalence.

But this most basic principle of translation equivalence is often thrown out the window (translate that italicized phrase into any other language!) when it comes to Bible translation. For some reason, Bible translators often try to match up forms of one language with forms of another language even when their meanings do not match, or at least when those forms are not used in the target language. In other words, Bible translators often do not use translation equivalents of the forms in the biblical languages. As a Bible translator myself, observing lack of translation equivalence is the most frustrating experience I have as I work with native speakers of languages who are translating the Bible and as I evaluate English translations of the Bible.

Instead of asking the question: "How would a native speaker of this language express the meaning of the wording of the source language," Bible translators often force the target language wording to answer a question more like: "How can we say it as closely as possible to the form of the source language so maybe it can be understood?" The idea of actual translation equivalence is often not considered.

We might be able to understand a Spanish speaker who is learning English if they say to us, "How are you called?" But we immediately know that they are not saying it in English the way we actually ask someone their name. Would that matter to us? I think so. Most of us understand better and feel more comfortable when things are said following the normal rules of our own language.

(to be continued)

translation equivalence - introduction

Translation equivalence exists between forms in a source language and a target language if their meaning matches.(1) I would also claim that a translation equivalent needs to be what people in a target language actually say or write for that particular meaning. In other words, translation equivalence should answer the question, "What do the speakers of this language actually say to express the desired meaning?" This is a very different question from ones that are often asked, instead, such as, "What could the speakers of this language say to express the desired meaning?" or, "Could the speakers of this language understand this wording as expressing the desired meaning?"

Let's look at some everyday examples of translation equivalence and then turn to equivalence in Bible translation.

When Spanish speakers want to learn the name of a person, they ask that person, "¿Cómo se llama?" A literal translation of the Spanish is: "How do you call yourself?" (or even more literally, in the Spanish word order, "How self you call?" But neither of these literal translations is what we English speakers say to someone to learn their name. The translation equivalent we use is, of course, "What's your name?" In the Cheyenne Indian language the translation equivalent is, "Nitonshivih?" literally, "you-how-named?"

In English we say, "It's hot" about the weather. The Spanish translation equivalent is "Hace calor," literally "It makes hot." If we literally translate "It's hot" from English to Spanish, we would get something like, "Es caliente," which would not be good Spanish.

In Spanish a young couple will often say, "Vamos a dar un paseo," literally, "we are going to give a walk." It would not be good English to use that literal translation for the same meaning. Instead, the English translation equivalent is, "We're going for a walk."

In English we have an idiom, "It's raining cats and dogs." We cannot translate this idiom literally to any other language and get a translation equivalent. Instead, we have to use an expression that means the same in each language. For Cheyenne we would say, "Ema'xêhoo'koho," literally "it-much-rain" or, in a smoother translation, "It's raining a lot."

Cheyennes say, "Ma'eno enehpoese," which literally means "The turtle is obstructing hanging." If we leave the translation literal no English speakers would know what that idiom means. The translation equivalent in English is, "It's foggy."

John Hobbins rightly criticizes translations such as the CEV whose translation equivalents, as a whole, make the CEV sound flat in terms of literary quality. But translations of the Bible need not sound flat at all.

(to be continued)

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(1) It's actually more complicated than this for the best translation, since we also want translation equivalence to match social register and literary genre, whenever possible.

Translation equivalence-1

Translation theorists have often debated whether and how a wording in a translation is "equivalent" to the wording in the source language to which it corresponds. Venessa Leonardi has summarized some of the main theories of translation equivalence in her article Equivalence in Translation: Between Myth and Reality.

In this post I'd like to come at the issue of equivalence in translation from the viewpoint of "levels" of language. Language is complex. Like anything which is complex, it resists being neatly categorized. But there are a variety of models from which we can view language. Each of them throws some light on our understanding of language. Here I will use the model of "levels" of language.

Each language discourse or text is made up of formal and semantic units which are made up of smaller units which are made up of even smaller units until we arrive at the smallest units of language. Linguists call the smallest units of meaning "morphemes." In English the word "jumped" consists of two morphemes, "jump" plus "-ed" which means past tense. Many English words have more than one morpheme. Some have only one morpheme, such as the word "tree."

The biblical texts are composed of language units which, ultimately, have morphemes as their smallest meaning units.

So one level at which we can ask if there is equivalence between a translation and its source text would be the morphemic level. We might ask if a translation has language units that account for each morpheme of the source text. Although I have never seen one, it would be possible to produce interlinear translations of biblical texts at the morpheme level. I myself have published a number of texts in the Cheyenne language which have morpheme-level glosses. Of course, to be understandable in English, we also include in such publications translations at a higher level of language than just the morpheme level. Morpheme-by-morpheme translation would not be very understandable to speakers of a target language.

Morphemes are grouped into words, the next level of language. Instead of evaluating translation equivalence at the morpheme level, we can evaluate it at the word level. We can ask if every word of the source text is accounted for in the translation.

Words group into phrases, the next higher level of language. Phrases are grouped into clauses. Clauses group into sentences. Sentences group into paragraphs. Paragraphs group into complete texts (discourses). It is possible to check for translation equivalence at each of these levels.

This is an overly simplified view of a levels model of language. It is a structural view of language, one which looks at language forms.

But language does not consist simply of forms. Each form has some meaning. The study of the semantics of biblical language texts is very important. No one could translate even a single word of biblical language texts if they knew nothing about the meanings of language units in those texts. Lexicographers have provided us with the information we need to know the meanings of language units in any language. Of course, here we are focused on the lexicography of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hellenistic (Koine) Greek. There are lexicons published for each of these languages.

Meaning itself is complex. Language units, whether at the smallest level, morpheme, or higher levels, often have meaning that cannot be fully captured with a simple gloss. We can gloss Greek pistis as 'faith' but this one English word does not include all of the meaning of that one Greek word. Language units not only include meanings which we can capture with simple glosses, but they also typically have other kinds of meaning, including connotations, nuances, register, relationships to other lexical units, etc.

Much of the debate over gender-inclusive language in English Bibles has revolved around the issue of nuances. In their major book on gender-inclusive language, Dr. Grudem and Dr. Poythress, insist that grammatically masculine forms in the Greek of the New Testament retain masculine nuance even when they refer to generic entities, such as a group of people composed of both males and females. (Not everyone agrees with that claim, by the way.)

We all intuitively sense that "kick the bucket" is not an adequate translation for a source language word meaning 'die' in most language contexts. The English idiom "kick the bucket" has colloquial, rather crude, connotations which are not part of the meaning of most words referring to dying. Connotations must be taken into consideration as part of meaning when evaluating translation equivalence.

There is an aspect of semantics which I call rhetorical meaning that is often critically important. If you are doing something I disapprove of and I say to you in an agitated voice, "What are you doing?" it is quite likely that I'm not really asking what you are doing. Instead, my rhetorical meaning is something like "Stop that right now!"

If you are standing near the window and I am not, and I say to you, "It's sure getting hot in here," it is likely that I'm not simply conveying to you information about the temperature in the room. Instead, my statement has a rhetorical meaning something like "Please open the window!" The person to whom I am speaking must be able to infer this meaning from what I have said for my meaning to be accurately communicated. So inferences and implicatures are important aspects of the meaning of utterances. The Bible is full of wordings which cannot be understood accurately unless we know the implications intended by those speaking or writing in the biblical text. Language utterances are like the metaphorical iceberg, where we only hear the tip of the iceberg. There is far more to communication below the surface. Everything below the surface (implicit meaning) is, ultimately, part of the meaning of source language texts and must be considered as part of translation equivalence.

In another post we'll consider translation equivalence in some Bible translation examples.