★★★★★ 5
A careful, scholarly work
Format: Hardcover
The introduction to this book does a great job of laying out the challenges of translating an ancient translation. It is not, however, aimed at people without a significant background in Hebrew, Greek and translation theory.
I give credit to the authors of the introduction, Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, for specifying the nature of the translation and its audience. Taken from Nida and Taber, _The Theory and Practice of Translation_ (Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 31: "a translation in the present-day literary language, so as to communicate to the well-educated constituency." The translators chose this group "on the assumption that it is most probably this audience that has a more than passing interest in traditions of biblical literature other than their own" (p. xiv). I think they are right about this.
"Translating an ancient text can only be described as a profoundly difficult undertaking....
"The difficulties of the undertaking are certainly not decreased when one attempts to translate an ancient translation into a modern language. If translating is an act of interpreting, as linguists suggest it is, rather than a simple transfer of meaning, a Greek interpretation of a Hebrew original can be expected to reflect what the translator understood the Hebrew text to mean. The end result is therefore inevitably to some degree a commentary written at a specific historical time and place by an individual person, whose understanding of the Hebrew will often have been at variance with our own, though at times perhaps equally viable." (p. xvi)
Indeed, back when I was a linguist- and translator-in-training at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (early 1980s), I was taught the rather simplistic model of translation as a mere transfer of meaning. Experience, though, has taught me that this is virtually impossible. A text of any level of sophistication above that of a stop sign is full of cultural assumptions, lexical polysemy, syntactic ambiguity, and so forth. Any translation is perforce an interpretation. The only way to even begin to compensate for this, if the readers of the translations are not scholars trained in the relevant fields, is to include a massive set of footnotes. The average reader is just not going to take the time to read such a set of notes, even if they are included. The majority of traditional religious readers of a Bible translation are not prepared to deal with the challenges that such footnotes would present to their existing understanding of the text.
The New English Translation of the Septuagint is aimed at those who already have at least some of the relevant scholarly background and are not averse to acquiring more.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2019
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