Narrative Discourse Analysis and Bible Translation: Training materials based on Acts 16:16–40

To make a translation that is natural, clear, and accurate, translators need to understand the discourse features of the language they are translating from and the language they are translating into, even if this is their mother tongue. These training materials describe important discourse features in narratives, such as natural ways of starting a new section, joining clauses and sentences, describing the characters in a story, representing speech and thoughts, highlighting important information, and distinguishing the main events from background information. Each chapter introduces a particular discourse feature and provides discovery procedures to help readers identify and describe this feature in their own languages. These procedures are then applied to the Greek text of Acts 16:16–40, and readers are guided through how to translate part of this passage. No previous knowledge of Greek is assumed. These materials can be used for private study, or as the basis for a workshop involving one or more translation teams.