Prefatory Note on Methodology and Translation Theory

In his recent study of biblical translation, John Barton observes: ‘The translatability of the Bible has been a normal perception for Christians almost from the beginning.’1 John Barton, The Word: On the Translation of the Bible (London: Penguin, 2022), p. 74. This book follows Barton in drawing on several influential models of translation theory. Jan de Waard and Eugene Nida distinguish between ‘formal equivalence’, which aims to convey the form, syntax or style of the source text, and ‘functional equivalence’, wherein a translator’s goal is to bring over the meaning rather than the form of the source.2 Jan de Waard and Eugene Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville: Nelson, 1986). Lawrence Venuti categorises translations as either ‘foreignising’ or ‘domesticating’ in approach: a foreignising translation is one in which a translator seeks to highlight the foreignness of the source text in the target language (i.e. the translation), for example through the use of archaic, non-standard or ‘foreign’ syntax or vocabulary carried over from the source text; in a domesticating translation, by contrast, a translator will strive to convey the meaning of the source text in the target language in as natural a manner as is possible, thereby minimising the sense of historical, cultural and linguistic difference.3 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (New York: Routledge, 1995). Katherine Reiss and Hans Vermeer identify five categories of translation: an ‘interlinear’ translation presents a word-for-word rendering of the source text which is ‘often incomprehensible for a reader who is not familiar with the source language’; a ‘literal’ translation, ‘unlike the interlinear version, observes the norms and rules of the target language’; a ‘philological’ translation is one in which ‘the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions of the source-text linguistic signs are “imitated” to such an extent that the target language may seem completely unnatural to the target audience’; in a ‘communicative’ translation, ‘the target text does not feel like a translation, at least not with regard to the language it uses; rather, it is […] an equivalent of the original text with regard to all of its dimensions’; and finally, a ‘creative’ translation is ‘a separate type where certain concepts, ways of thinking, ideas, objects, etc. do not exist in the target culture so that the translator has to create new terms with which to refer to them’.4 Katherine Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained, trans. by Christiane Nord and Marina Dudenhöfer (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), pp. 124–5. Reiss and Vermeer further emphasise that the form of every ‘translational act’ is determined by its purpose (for which they use the Greek term skopos), which may differ from that of the source text.5 Reiss and Vermeer, pp. 85–93. Finally, George Steiner outlines four stages of translation which he refers to collectively as the ‘hermeneutic motion’: first comes ‘affirmation’, an ‘initiative trust, an investment of belief […] in the meaningfulness’ of the source text; the next stage is ‘aggression’ or ‘plundering’, whereby the ‘translator invades, extracts and brings home’ elements of the source text; the third stage, ‘incorporation’ or ‘embodiment’, involves the adaptation of the source text into the target language and the decision to retain or omit certain elements; the fourth and final stage is ‘compensation’ or ‘restitution’, whereby the translator attempts to redress that which has been lost in the act of translation.6 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 312–19. These theoretical approaches inform the methodology of the case studies presented in this book, allowing for comparison of the translation strategies adopted by the authors of Old English biblical prose.