Textwahrheit und Übersetzen. Beobachtungen an neueren Bibelübersetzungen

Recently many new German bible translations have appeared. The article first presents a comparison of paragraphs from ten different translations, with examples taken from the New Testament. This shows some basic trends. On the one hand, the objective of bible translation is Christian education, edification and worship usage. On the other hand, some translations focus on the cultural information, easy readability and inclusive language. Such orientation accepts purposeful adaptation and thus modifies the original text. And there are a few translations that constitute the product of an individual interpretation of the text, and its presentation in a literary form. The discussion of these translation trends is complemented by a critique of the prominent focus on the language rather than on the message, and the question of a text's truth and a translator's linguistic awareness is raised. The traditional translation criticism distinguishing between literal and target-oriented translation, and even cultural adaptation, is integrated here by a discussion of the procedural, functional, objectivistic and ethical implications of the new bible translations. One feature of all recent projects of bible translation seems to be a pedagogical concern. Authors think that they need to guide readers in their interpretation, because those may be unable to understand the very old, strange and often opaque text; or they might misunderstand it and thus miss the true message; or they should learn something about the historic culture; and last but not least, traditional patriarchal attitudes promoted by Christianity should be overcome with a new text. The idea is that people's thinking can be directed by language. Thus the question is raised, whether a translation should also be an interpretation. In a critical view of the interpretive translation, this article presents the hermeneutic approach to translation. This implies a well-informed openness as an attitude towards the original message, rather than a method. The focus is neither on language structure nor on the addressees, but on the text's message. This includes the problem of understanding a written text, what is never a matter of fact. The text's theological exegesis is a prerequisite for the translation, but the value of that translation is not only based on that. Translation aims at a faithful representation of the message and opens the direction of a text, but the individual interpretation is always done by the readers themselves. When the translator as a reader identifies himself with the message, s/he will cognitively produce formulations apt to give resonance to this message. The translator becomes a co-author of that text, and just as for the original author, one will never totally govern the readers' understanding. The translator's voice will be more convincing, when only one person is responsible for the text production, different from the team works in various official projects of bible translation. Even if the bible as such is a composition of many different books and pieces of texts, these manifold voices may be better noted by one translator alone, rather than by many contributors, each of whom as a specialist only translates one book. Finally, the stylistic shape of the target text is decisive. The bible translator should have an excellent knowledge of the target language, in order to present various nuances. Translating is not an information about an original text, it represents that original message in another language

Komparatistik und Neues Testament

Die Arbeit geht der Frage nach, ob das Neue Testament im Speziellen, religiöse Schriften im Allgemeinen, Erkenntnisobjekte der Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft sein können. Diesem Aspekt wird sowohl in pragmatischer wie auch in programmatischer Hinsicht nachgespürt. Des Weiteren wird der historische rote Faden innerhalb der (theologischen) Bibelübersetzung skizziert, und aufgezeigt, wie diese zunächst von der Übersetzung als von Gott inspirierte Tätigkeit ausging, sich im Weiteren jedoch auch zur philologischen Methode weiterentwickelte, sodass Bibelübersetzung heute im Allgemeinen als Kombination von Inspiration und Philologie verstanden wird. Darüber hinaus werden die Bemühungen der letzten Jahrzehnte aufgezeigt, Errungenschaften der Übersetzungswissenschaft für die Bibelübersetzung heranzuziehen, um so die Qualität der einzelnen Übersetzungen noch zu erhöhen. Abschließend kommt es zum Vergleich einzelner Bibelübersetzungen des deutschsprachigen Neuen Testaments, anhand ausgewählter Bibelstellen

Eugene A. Nida and his contribution to Translation Studies

This theoretic-historiographical thesis examines the life and work of the linguist and translation theorist Eugene A. Nida (1914-2011). It analyses his theoretical and methodological underpinnings, most important publications and theories and evalues his contribution to translation studies. Nida is presented in his role of theoretician, methodologician and organiser, whose theory of formal and dynamic (or functional) equivalence contributed to the development of Bible translation and translation theory in general. The thesis includes comprehensive bibliography of E. Nida.Tato teoreticko-historiografická práce se zabývá životem a dílem lingvisty a teoretika překladu Eugena A. Nidy (1914-2011), analyzuje jeho teoreticko-metodologická východiska, hlavní monografie, teorie a hodnotí jeho přínos ve vývoji translatologie. Nida je představen jako teoretik, metodolog a organizátor, jehož teorie formální a dynamické (resp. funkční) ekvivalence z 60. let ovlivnila vývoj biblického překládání i teorii překladu obecně. Práce obsahuje také kompletní bibliografii díla E. Nidy.Institute of Translation StudiesÚstav translatologieFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

God’s Life-Giving Character and the Double-Dimension of Sin in Paul's Romans

"In his letter to the Romans, Paul shows God’s character as life-giving. This premise suggests that the sufferings of the world that lead to decay as described in Rom 8:18–30 are not directly attributable to God. Thus, other elements in creational existence could also play a negative role. An understanding of Paul’s hamartiology in view of a double-dimension of sin could guide readers in discerning a meaning of Romans 8:20 in the context of ecological crisis." Paper delivered at the international consultation on "Resources and Best Practice Models for Ecotheology, Climate Justice and Food Security", held at the Academy of Volos, Demetriades Diocese of Church of Greece, 10-13 March, 201

Machine Translation of Low-Resource Spoken Dialects: Strategies for Normalizing Swiss German

The goal of this work is to design a machine translation (MT) system for a low-resource family of dialects, collectively known as Swiss German, which are widely spoken in Switzerland but seldom written. We collected a significant number of parallel written resources to start with, up to a total of about 60k words. Moreover, we identified several other promising data sources for Swiss German. Then, we designed and compared three strategies for normalizing Swiss German input in order to address the regional diversity. We found that character-based neural MT was the best solution for text normalization. In combination with phrase-based statistical MT, our solution reached 36% BLEU score when translating from the Bernese dialect. This value, however, decreases as the testing data becomes more remote from the training one, geographically and topically. These resources and normalization techniques are a first step towards full MT of Swiss German dialects.Comment: 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan

Making Otherness Accessible Functionality and Skopos in the Translation of New Testament Texts

After describing a translation process under the condition of “split competence,” the article analyzes cases of cultural distance, drawing on the author’s experience in the translation of New Testament texts. A functional translation which strives after making the otherness of these texts accessible to modern readers, has to carefully define the skopos and the addressed audience, in order to give translation decisions a solid foundation. After the discussion of a number of examples from the New Testament, the author ventures to conclude that the functional translation of these texts can be considered a paradigmatic case of translation in general and that translation competence is not essentially linked to a language-and-culture pair.Après la description du processus de traduction collective au moyen de « compétences partagées », le présent article examine des exemples d’éloignement culturel tirés de la version allemande de textes du Nouveau Testament par l’auteure. Une traduction fonctionnelle qui cherche à rendre l’étrangeté de ces textes accessible aux lecteurs d’aujourd’hui se doit de cerner très précisément son skopos et ses destinataires. Sur la base des exemples étudiés, l’auteure conclut que la traduction fonctionnelle de ces textes peut devenir un paradigme de la traduction en général et que la compétence traductive n’est pas indissolublement associée à une quelconque paire de langues et de cultures