Bridging the cultural gap: Bible translation as a case in point
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Date
2002
Authors
Nord, C.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State
Abstract
Translation practitioners have always been aware of the fact that translation is not a
purely linguistic operation but a means of facilitating communication between
members of different cultures. Translation scholars have only recently discovered
this fairly obvious aspect of their field - and the functional approach to translation
— or skopos theory — was instrumental in turning it into one of the main concerns
of modern translation studies. New Testament and early Christian texts refer to a
culture from which we are separated by a huge cultural gap. They have been translated
and re-translated many times during the past (almost) 2000 years and into
almost all languages on the planet. In spite of that, we do not always feel that the
cultural gap has really been bridged. Does this justify yet another translation?
Together with my husband, Klaus Berger, who is a New Testament scholar at
Heidelberg University, I was engaged in a fascinating project: We translated the
texts of the New Testament plus a large number of apocrypha from the original
Greek (and Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic) into German. It was the first
translation of these texts that involved a theologian and a translation scholar, and it
was the first translation based on modern functional translation theory. Using a few
examples from our translation and comparing them to several translations into other
modern languages (such as Afrikaans, English, and French), I would like to show
how we went about in order to bridge the cultural gap, making the texts understandable
to modern German readers without taking away their strangeness.
Description
Keywords
Translation theory, Culture, Bible translation
Citation
Nord, C. (2002). Bridging the cultural gap: Bible translation as a case in point. Acta Theologica, 22(1), 98-116.