User:Alastair Haines/Discussion papers

General style issues
I think it may be worth documenting some general comments about how I'm translating, as well as some details and examples of the methodology.

In general terms, I view the process as having restrictions and freedoms. Restrictions are provided by the languages Greek and English, by the text, and by my perceptions of who might be readers of a Wiki embedded translation.

My own limitations in understanding all these restrictions are an influence I seek to minimize by consulting a range of sources; but only others, more enlighted than I, can judge how far my translation is injured by my limitations.

Restrictions are well documented in the case of the languages and the text. What is of methodological interest is freedoms, which actually arise out of restraints regarding English and readers. What I mean can be illustrated by two examples.

Some readers will not be familiar with a word like apostle, which (to my way of thinking) is a Koine Greek loanword in "Christian English". The word apostle does have both usage and reference outside Christian contexts, but even such usage is loaded with associations drawn from Christianity. In fact, such usage would probably strictly-speaking prefer quotation marks, to indicate its non-standard or metaphorical nature.

I have chosen "emissary" as a gloss for apostolos, because the word suggests an official delegate, which is the sense of apostolos in the NT, and also because it is derived from the Latin version of the Greek word. My first gloss was "missionary", also from the Latin, because it's a more common word and well suited to the biblical context; however, on reflection I realised that apostolos in NT times was not primarily a "religious" word. So, the rejection of "apostle" as a gloss comes from the restriction related to readers of this translation--it cannot be assumed they speak "Christian English". Similar issues arise with using words like "grace" and "evangelise". Other words, like "carnal" are simply exotic in modern English and hence unsuited to readers of this translation.

The second example of freedoms utilized to address restrictions is far more common in my translation. Greek prefered sentences to have connectives--either conjunctions or particles. In fact, there are a large number of these, though a few are used very commonly, with a wide range of senses, most notably, the Greek particle de. The imprecision of de in Greek allows for freedoms in translation, which are however restricted by an English requirement of more precision in connectives.

Broadly speaking then, English provides great freedom in vocabulary available to render the sense of the Greek, however this is constrained in various ways, including attempting to maximize one-for-one glossing of Greek words. Hence, where this is abandoned, I attempt to "make good the loss" by providing notes, like that for charis (grace) rendered diversely as "blessing", "kindness" and "gift" at the very beginning of this translation.

As a general rule, I've sometimes pushed right to the boundaries of what is possible within English freedoms, in order to accomodate even word order and equivalence of grammatical form--participles as participles, infinitives as infinitives and so on. Number and tense are retained, even when apparantly irrelevant. Overall, I expect my translation will "feel" a little artificial, because it provides some renderings that are technically possible in English, but uncommon in ordinary speech. Also, it will feel a little heavy-handed to some other translators, because it is willing to render irrelevancies despite their unidiomatic flavour. However, I think this is the right direction for a Wiki translation to follow. We are not writing for liturgical use or for personal devotion, nor even with evangelistic intent. If any translation has a good excuse for sticking closely to formal equivalence, it is this translation. Perhaps that might even prove to be its greatest strength long term.

Any comments regarding specifics or generalities discussed above would be welcome. Alastair Haines 06:55, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

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