[gothic-l] Translating creeds?

Thu Jan 1 22:06:56 UTC 2015

 Dear Roel,

 The ancient view towards translating holy texts was that the translation ought to be as close to the original as possible, hence the mainly word-for-word translation following the original word-order that is typical of not only the Gothic BIble but also the Vulgate and Old Church Slavonic counterparts, amongst others. This topic has been studied, but unfortunately, I do not have anything handy here to give in the way of recommended reading, should you wish to investigate this further.

 This slavish approach does not mean, however, that the resulting text is necessarily unidiomatic. It should be borne in mind that Gothic stems ultimately from the same linguistic source as Greek, to wit, Proto-Indo-European, and that many syntactic features were likely still shared, which made it possible to translate word-for-word and apparently not end up with merely glosses rather than a translation. Indeed, many of the patterns of Gothic word-order, which follow slavishly the Greek, can also be found in the other early Germanic languages, in texts that are not translations of anything. This suggests that there were considerably fewer constraints on ordering elements in these earlier languages. Determining what nuances were created by varying the order of elements is a far more difficult task, and there is presently no scholarly consensus concerning word-order in Gothic or even Old English (which is so much better known and understood).

 My recommendation is that anyone wishing to write in Gothic (and not merely translate religious texts) should imitate the word-order of its sister languages, namely, Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Norse.

 Edmund

---In Gothic-L at yahoogroups.com, <roellingua at ...> wrote :

 Edmund, do you recommend to follow the original word order only for holy texts? I translate (also to practice my Gothic) a lot of song texts into Gothic, but those aren't holy texts at all. I don't feel that it's really necessary to keep the original word order there and I prefer a free word order there. There are some religious song texts however too, I think those are the only necessary ones to keep a word-for-word word order in.

 2015-01-01 22:05 GMT+01:00 Dicentis a <roellingua at ... mailto:roellingua at ...>:
 I found your text at this website too. If you click at a word, the Greek translation appears: http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/main/creeds/homoean_creed_of_constantinople_360.shtml http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/main/creeds/homoean_creed_of_constantinople_360.shtml

 2015-01-01 22:04 GMT+01:00 Dicentis a <roellingua at ... mailto:roellingua at ...>:
 The Nicene Creed in Gothic can be found here: https://gutrazda.wordpress.com/neogothic/other-stuff/writings/nicene-creed/ https://gutrazda.wordpress.com/neogothic/other-stuff/writings/nicene-creed/ 

 As for your problem with the Greek text. Unfortunately it won't be available at this website, but if you want to translate parts of the Bible in the future, Biblehub can be a great resource with Greek to English word-for-word translations: http://biblehub.com/interlinear/apostolic/john/1.htm http://biblehub.com/interlinear/apostolic/john/1.htm

 2015-01-01 22:00 GMT+01:00 Marja Erwin marja-e at ... mailto:marja-e at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>:
 I’m trying to translate that of Constantinople 360. I haven’t seen any of Gothic translation of this one, or of Wulfila’s personal creed as recorded by Auxentius [which has nagging gaps anyway].

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