SIL International Publications

Journal of Translation

Journal of Translation 2(1) (2006)

Editor’s Foreword


by Catherine Rountree


“The wheels grind very slowly, but very fine.”


The original plan for the Journal of Translation was a three times a year publication. But we are finding that the wheels of a peer-reviewed journal for high quality academic articles “grind very slowly and very fine.”


In the first place, articles often move very slowly through the process. The authors and reviewers are very busy people and it sometimes takes a long time for them to fit an article revision or review into their full...

In 1987 E.D. Hirsch published his bestseller Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. The education system of the time seriously underestimated the importance of background knowledge needed to successfully function in literate American society. Drawing on two decades of experimental research, Hirsch showed that without the background information needed for a given text, readers are effectively illiterate with regard to that text. He argued that quantitatively, too, background knowledge plays a major role in comprehension: the information explicitly stated in any text...

Psalm 18 is especially relevant to the occasional use of what might be called ‘old preterites’ in the Hebrew Bible. These forms act exactly like wyyqtl, i.e., the waw consecutive with the imperfect in respect to being a narrative tense and limited to clause initial position, but lack the w- on the front. In this particular psalm the distribution of this form correlates with the narrative progress which can be posited within the psalm. A secondary value in this psalm is its possible light on the use of the two basic forms of the Hebrew verb, the perfect (qtl) and...

I have five goals for this paper. First, I will demonstrate the influence that the understanding of metaphor has had on the praxis of translation. Second, I will introduce and apply more recent insights in human conceptual processes, in particular those of image-schemas, conceptual metaphors and conceptual blends. Third, I will introduce optimality principles and relate them to the suggested conceptual blends. Fourth, I will present some translations of conceptual blends and then suggest optimality principles for translating conceptual blends and evaluate the...