Journal of Translation
Issue 1(3)
Journal of Translation 1(3) (2005)
Editors’ Foreword
by Catherine Rountree and Ralph Hill
From the time we entered the translation world until the 1990’s, Bible translators debated translation theory mainly in terms of literal versus idiomatic translations. It seemed to be generally accepted that literal translations were the “old way” of doing translation and idiomatic translations were the new trend. However, in a recent publication, Douglas Robinson has put together an interesting collection of translations and documents on translation written by people through the years, from Herodotus to Nietzche....
The terms translated “Messiah,” “Christ,” and “Lamb of God” in English versions of the Bible would have created significant contextual effects in the minds of the original hearers when applied to Jesus. This paper investigates the use of these terms in their original context through a semantic analysis based on logical and encyclopedic entries and then considers some implications for translation. The approach to translation is based on Relevance Theory and in particular the notion of Direct Translation.
In the late twentieth century any given model of translation was constrained by the code model of communication and by the theory of linguistics upon which it was based. Whereas the code model supplied the notion of equivalence as the standard by which a translation was evaluated, the linguistic theory supplied what was regarded as the minimal unit of translation. Accordingly, as linguistic theories were formulated to account for increasingly larger units of text, translation models were redesigned so that the notion of equivalence mirrored the size of these linguistic...