SIL International Publications

Journal of Translation

Journal of Translation 2(2) (2006)

Editor’s Foreword


by Ralph Hill


The “era of translation studies”? Well let’s hear about it!


In an introductory chapter entitled Scripture Translation in the Era of Translation Studies, Aloo Mojola and Ernst Wendland give a nice summary of the last few decades of modern Bible translation history (Bible Translation: Frames of Reference, ed. Tim Wilt. St. Jerome Publishing, 2003). They describe two distinct “eras,” namely, the “Nida era,” characterized by a dynamic equivalence approach to Bible translation, and the emergence...

This paper presents a modification of the types of supportive information that Breeze (1992) identified for hortatory discourses as a basis for bringing out the mismatches that are most likely to occur when translating from a verb-object (VO) language to an object-verb (OV) language. Earlier sections review the factors that underlie Longacre's (1996) classification of texts into four broad categories and outline what characterizes mainline information for each genre. They are followed by illustrations of deductive and inductive reasoning from Koiné Greek and Ancient Hebrew, since deductive...

At least three discourse-related areas of exegesis tend not to be handled satisfactorily in many commentaries: the order of constituents in the clause and sentence, the presence versus absence of the article with nouns, and the significance of the conjunctions used. This paper first shows how insights from the work of Simon Dik, Jan Firbas and Knud Lambrecht have contributed to our understanding of the significance of variations in constituent order. Other insights that bear on constituent order are the Principle of Natural Information Flow and the distinction between default versus marked...

This paper builds on one entitled, “The Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis” (Levinsohn 2006b), and seeks to address how consultants might ensure that the features discussed there have been adequately handled in a translation into a receptor language. Initially, translators need to have undertaken appropriate research into the way that relevant discourse features function in the language. The features that should most concern consultants are those that function in significantly different ways in the source and receptor languages. A common error in translation is to use a...

I argued in Levinsohn 2000a that Ancient Hebrew uses seemingly redundant nouns to refer to active subjects not only in connection with a change of time or location or when the speech or action performed by the subject is to be highlighted, but also to mark story development. Cross-linguistically, development may be marked on two axes: the linkage axis and/or the agent axis. Many verb-final languages mark development along both axes, as do some Bantu languages. Koiné Greek and English mark development primarily along the linkage axis by means of appropriate conjunctions. Ancient Hebrew and...

As one type of cross-cultural communication, the literary translation is more difficult for the translator as he has to deal with a large chunk of implicit information. The implicit information has as its characteristics, such as graded communicability, context-dependence, the correlation among the implicit information, text and context, etc. These characteristics restrict the communicability of the literary texts in another context, so the translator of the literary texts often finds more difficulties in translating. Encouraged by Gutt’s theory and his recent findings, this article adopts...