16.2711, Review: Translation: Long (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2711. Wed Sep 21 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2711, Review: Translation: Long (2005)

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1)
Date: 13-Sep-2005
From: Charles Häberl < haberl at fas.harvard.edu >
Subject: Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 02:47:57
From: Charles Häberl < haberl at fas.harvard.edu >
Subject: Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? 
 

AUTHOR: Long, Lynne
TITLE: Translation and Religion
SUBTITLE: Holy Untranslatable?
SERIES: Topics in Translation
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1645.html 

Charles G. Häberl, Department of Near Eastern Languages and 
Civilizations, Harvard University

>From the perspective of an outsider, it would seem only natural that 
translation theory and the study of religious texts would be intimately 
connected, as the sacred texts of various religious traditions comprise 
some of the earliest corpora to be translated, as well as some of the 
largest corpora, and the translations of religious texts are often 
broadly distributed and prove to have a lasting value of their own.  For 
these reasons, religious texts (and their translations) provide scholars 
with a wealth of information into the process of translation and the 
factors which influence this process and its end results.  Furthermore, 
as Hussein Abdul-Raof remarks in the final essay of the volume, the 
language of "the religious aspects of a culture are usually the most 
difficult, both in analysis of the source vocabulary and in finding the 
best receptor language equivalents" (p. 171).  It is in the translation of 
religious texts that the translator encounters his most difficult 
challenges, to the extent that many claim that religious texts (such as 
the Qur'an) defy translation, and yet, paradoxically, religious texts are 
the texts most likely to be translated, repeatedly and continuously 
according to the needs of the community.  

SUMMARY

Lynne Long remarks in her introduction to the volume, "it would not be 
overstating the case to say that scriptural movement between cultures 
has been a major source of development in translation theory."  Many 
of the challenges discussed by today's translators and translation 
theorists were prefigured by the original agents of this scriptural 
movement.  As a result, there exists an enormous wealth of literature 
on the translation of religious texts, just as the years since 1923?the 
year in which Walter Benjamin's translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux 
parisiens was first published, prefaced by his seminal essay Die 
Aufgabe des Übersetzers (English title "The task of the translator," 
Benjamin, 1968)?have seen the production of a considerable amount 
of material on translation theory.   The introduction makes it clear that 
one of the manifest goals of this book was to introduce both the 
general reader and the scholar interested in translation theory to this 
body of literature, which constitutes a mine of information for the field.  

The book is divided into two sections, each composed of seven 
essays.  The first deals with the issues of translating religious texts on 
a broad scale, both cross-culturally and within specific traditions, and 
the second deals with case studies relating to a particular problem in 
translation.

The list of contributors is a miscellany of scholars in the fields of 
Theology, Literature, Linguistics, and Area Studies of various sorts. 
Consequently, the book provides an introduction to the methodologies 
used in the study of major religious traditions such as Judaism, 
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and touches upon "broad issues 
such as historicity, linguistics, cultural theory, sociology, theology, and 
philosophy as well as more specific cases of gender, art, metaphor, 
humour, status, editing, patronage, and interpretation" (p. 15).  The 
blurb on the back of the book advertises the range of texts treated 
within it as "ambitious," and in this it does not deceive.

The volume begins with Christopher Shackle's extremely personal 
excursus into highlights from the recent (post 19th-century) translation 
history of three religious texts, the Bible, the Masnavi of Rumi, and the 
Sikh scriptures, the Adi Granth ("From Gentleman's Outfitters to 
Hyperbazaar: A Personal Approach to Translating the Sacred," pp.  
19-32).  Despite the fact that Shackle's essay is indeed personal 
(thanks to his inclusion of various vignettes from his own education 
and academic career), the term "personal" in the title of his essay 
should not necessarily be taken as an endorsement of any such 
approach.  At one point, he inveighs against the "New Age 
typographic layouts," apparently inspired by Japanese haiku, which 
characterize many recent (and, in his opinion, unsatisfactory) 
translations of religious texts.  Shackle concludes that "context rather 
than content makes the holy untranslatable," implying that it is not so 
much the content of a given text that renders it untranslatable, but its 
religious context within the community, and the struggle for control 
over that text's interpretation.

K. Onur Toker ("Prophecy and Tongues: St. Paul, Prophecy, and 
Building the House," pp. 33-40) focuses instead upon the Christian 
tradition at the beginning of the Common Era.  In this context, his 
essay offers a much more theological approach to the issue of 
translation, concerning the central importance of hermeneutics to Paul 
and the formation of the early church.  He takes up once again the 
topic of the "impossible necessity" of translation after Babel first 
identified by Derrida in his essay "Des Tours de Babel" (1985).  Toker 
concludes that, if the confusion of tongues at Babel rendered 
translation both necessary and impossible, Pentecost marked the 
conclusion of the punishment upon the Semites, by stripping Hebrew 
and Aramaic of their privileged status as sacred languages and 
essentially rendering them irrelevant.  To Paul, according to Toker, 
the act of translation was nothing less than prophetic, rendering 
the "univocal signified or spirit of the Bible in different, more common 
and intelligible, words or letters, that is to say, signifiers" (p. 40).

It is only natural that Buddhism, a tradition which spans the continent 
of Asia and has become one of the fastest growing religions in the rest 
of the world, should be represented here. Kate Crosby ("What Does 
Not Get Translated in Buddhist Studies and the Impact on Teaching," 
pp. 41-53) discusses one of the problems faced by scholars of 
Buddhism, particularly Theravada Buddhism.  While she makes a 
convincing case for her thesis?namely, that the absence of certain 
texts in translation may play as important a role as the presence of 
others in shaping in the outsider's perception of a religion?certain 
statements detract from the credibility of her essay.  For example, she 
casually mentions the adoption of a form of Buddhism by early 
Christian monastics (p. 41), or the influence of Korean printing 
methods used for the Buddhist canon on the development of the 
Gutenberg press (p. 42), as if they were conventional wisdom and 
gives absolutely no citations.  Incredibly, she admits that these 
sensationalist claims have absolutely nothing to do with her argument, 
which leaves one wondering why she included them in the first place; 
certainly they have no relevance to the subject matter.  The rest of the 
article is thankfully free of such embellishments, save for one oblique 
reference to "pre-modern world Buddhism [stretching] to the Danube 
in the West."

Leonard Greenspoon's essay ("Texts and Contexts: Perspectives on 
Jewish Translations of the Hebrew Bible," pp. 54-64) takes a different 
approach to the issue of translation by examining a series of 
translations of a single work (the Tanakh, or Jewish scriptures) within 
the context of a single community (the Jews) over an extended period 
of time. Greenspoon notes that Jewish translations, as a general rule, 
tend to privilege the source language.  In his view, Jewish translations 
of their holy literature are "intended to supplement, not supplant; 
complement, not replace, the original."  The Jewish commitment to the 
Hebrew language has resulted in the adoption of what he 
terms "sensible or comprehensible literalism."  It was not until the 18th 
century that Jewish translations began to depart from "sensible 
literalism" to what has come to be termed "functional equivalence" (De 
Waard and Nida, 1986)?largely in the context of the Jews' 
assimilation to the societies in which they found themselves in 
diaspora.  Indeed, the German translation produced by Moses 
Mendelssohn and the English translation produced by the Jewish 
Publication Society looked to preexisting gentile translations as a 
model?the Luther Bible in the case of the former and the 1885 
Revised Version of the King James Bible in the case of the latter.

The central texts of Hinduism are examined within the next 
essay, "Making Sanskritic or Making Strange? How Should We 
Translate Classical Hindu Texts?" by W.J. Johnson (pp. 65-74).   The 
title of his essay suggests two major strategies for translating Hindu 
texts (anticipated by Friedrich Schleiermacher already in the 18th 
century): "domesticating" the translation, thereby privileging the target 
language, and "foreignizing" it, which makes it appear strange to 
speakers of the target language.  Johnson notes that a compelling 
translation of any of the Classical Hindu texts has yet to be written, 
unlike, say, the Classical texts of the Greek and Latin traditions.  For 
this reason, he says, Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita have not 
yet become part of the target tradition (by which he presumably 
means the Anglophone world) in the same way that the Iliad and the 
Odyssey have.  Johnson therefore calls for a new purpose in 
translation - namely, to produce an enduring literary classic, not a 
religious one. Much like Shackle, he condemns translations 
conforming too closely to both "New Age" and "King James" style 
language as insufficient for this purpose, due to the effect that the 
language used in writing a translation has upon our understanding of 
its content.

Adriana Serban offers an excellent analysis of the limitations upon 
translators of religious texts in her essay on "Archaising versus 
Modernising in English Translations of the Orthodox Liturgy: St. John 
Chrysostomos in the 20th Century" (pp. 75-88).   Much like Shackle, 
she notes that translators of sacred texts are seldom free to do as 
they please.  Most liturgical translations are deliberately retrospective 
(at one point, in reference to the much maligned use of King James 
language in these types of translations, she describes the process as 
one of "colonising the past") and governed by the translator's 
expectations of his audience.  The use of archaic language cannot 
necessarily be attributed to the date of the translation's publication.  In 
fact, one of the more recent translations of the liturgy, the 1982 
version based upon Old Church Slavonic manuscripts, is much more 
archaizing than the translation prepared by Archbishop Athenagoras 
Kokkinakis, which preceded it.  Serban concludes that the language 
adopted by translators of the liturgy owes much to the intended 
audience and purpose of the translation, following Hans Vermeer's 
skopos theory of translation (1996).

The first part of the book concludes with Peter Kirk's essay "Holy 
Communicative?  Current Approaches to Bible Translation Worldwide" 
(p. 89-101).  Much like Toker, Kirk takes up the central significance of 
translation to the Christian tradition, claiming that "it was in 
Christianity, and from its very start, that the principle was clearly 
established that the Holy Scriptures, even the words of God and of 
Christ, could and should be translated" (p. 89).  While some of his 
claims are dubious (such as his statement that the New Testament 
was being translated into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic by the 2nd century, 
p. 89), and his frequent reliance upon online sources may raise some 
eyebrows, what follows is, for the most part, a highly thoughtful history 
of scholarship on Bible translation.  He notes that many of the issues 
currently debated by translation theorists were already foreseen by 
Jerome, author of the Vulgate translation of the Bible, who sought to 
find a middle road between the slavishly literal and anarchy of 
uncontrolled freedom.  Much like Johnson, he notes that religious 
translations are judged according to their relevance as well as their 
perceived legitimacy, without which they run the risk of being unread.  
Like Shackle and Serban, however, he concludes that the chief 
obstacle faced by the translator of religious texts lies in the 
expectations made of their interpretation rather than their actual 
content.

In the second portion of the volume, we are introduced to seven 
specific case studies in translation theory.  David Jasper, author 
of "Settling Hoti's Business: The Impossible Necessity of Biblical 
Translation," (pp. 105-114) takes the philologists and New Testament 
scholars to task for what he perceives as their interminable focus 
upon the minutiae of grammar and their unwillingness to let the text 
itself stand as "its own best interpreter." He makes particular 
reference to the Gospel of Mark, a close study of which leaves the 
reader with more questions than answers.  A good translation, in his 
opinion, is far more valuable than any detailed philological treatment 
of the text?for a good translator accepts that there is nothing outside 
of the text itself (according to Derrida's celebrated aphorism, "il n'y a 
pas de hors texte").  In his view, at the heart of the "impossible 
necessity of Biblical translation is a religious imperative and a 
mystery" - namely, that the work of translation is absolutely 
necessary, but can only take our understanding of the text so far.   At 
some point we will reach the limits of translation, and beyond that lies 
the mystery.

Johnathan Gold ("Guardian of the Translated Dharma: Sakya Pandita 
on the Role of the Tibetan Scholar", pp. 115-128) focuses upon a 
single work on translation, Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen's Entryway 
into Scholarship, which details the issues faced by Tibetan Buddhists 
working from translations of Buddhist scriptures in the 13th century.  
Sakya Pandita identifies four areas of scholarship necessary for 
safeguarding the interpretation of translated texts - obscure 
vocabulary, translation techniques, common translation mistakes, and 
unclear (literary) contexts - while at the same time assuming in his 
audience a high degree of literacy in both the source and the target 
languages.  Gold argues that while Sakya Pandita ultimately places 
his faith in the translatability of sacred texts, he is preoccupied with 
preserving the interpretation of these texts within an elite community 
of literate scholars.

While Jasper and Gold concern themselves with a single author, 
David Burke ("The Translation of the Hebrew Word 'ish: A Brief 
Historical Comparison", pp.129-140) concerns himself with a single 
word.  Burke recounts the criticism that the redactors of the latest 
edition of the New International Version faced after introducing gender-
inclusive language.  The leaders of the Religious Right in America, 
chief among them James Dobson (more recently in the news for his 
crusade against Spongebob Squarepants), identified the new 
translation as a capitulation to a "radical feminist agenda."  Among the 
guidelines hastily established by Dobson and his peers for future Bible 
translations was the demand that the Hebrew word 'ish be translated 
as "man" wherever it occurred.  Burke scans the translation of this 
particular word in translations from the Septuagint to the modern day 
and concludes that Dobson's guidelines fail to take into consideration 
the semantic range of the word, impose an artificial consistency where 
one had never existed before, and might actually hinder the public's 
comprehension of the text.

The problems inherent in translating a living oral tradition into an 
appropriate written form, particularly in a literate culture, are the topic 
of Nile Green's essay, "Translating the Spoken Words of the Saints: 
Oral Literature and the Sufis of Aurangabad" (pp. 141-150).  Green 
focuses upon a genre of Muslim South Asian literature?the malfuzat, 
or recorded conversations of Sufi saints, which are sacred in their own 
right, if not possessing the same degree of prestige as the Qur'an and 
the Hadith.  In fact, the sacred status of these oral traditions vis-à-vis 
the much better-established claims of the primary written texts is one 
of the chief concerns that preoccupies Green.  Green concludes that, 
despite their claims to authenticity, the original conversations of the 
Sufi saints have been "translated" to conform to the prevailing literary 
standard, so as to ensure their claims to the sacred and their place in 
the preexisting hagiographic tradition of Muslim South Asia.

Sue Niebrzydowski ("From Scriptorium to Internet: The Implication of 
Audience on the Translation of the Psalms of the St Albans Psalter", 
pp. 151-161) examines a recent online publication of a single 
illustrated manuscript, and the translation that accompanies it.  She 
identifies this translation as a working example of a skopos-driven 
translation (following Munday's, 2001) of a frequently translated 
religious text, one made with a variety of concerns in mind that make it 
differ from a general translation. Chief amongst these concerns are a 
desire to make the text reflect its interpretation during the 12th 
century, the time of its authorship, and particularly to reflect the text as 
it stood (and was understood) by the illustrator himself, rather than the 
contemporary interpretation of the Psalms.  As a result, the translation 
conforms to the source text in terms of its punctuation and 
orthography of place names.  At the same time, the spiritual 
significance of this religious text to the modern reader is not the 
concern of the translator, which liberates the translator from the 
constraints imposed by contemporary interpretations of the text.  
These are the limitations and benefits of the skopos-driven approach.
 
Hussein Abdul-Raof begins his essay on "Cultural Aspects in Qur'an 
Translation" (pp. 162-172) arguing for the traditional view that the 
Qur'an defies attempts at translating it.  In his view, the Qur'an differs 
from other religious texts in that it was "revealed in an Arab context of 
culture that is entirely alien to a target language audience outside the 
Arab peninsula" (p. 162).  In his opinion, the liturgical, emotive, and 
cultural associations of the expressions found in the Qur'an pose the 
greatest obstacle to a translator.  He makes several interesting points 
(such as his claim that the context of culture?what he calls 
the "natural habitat of words"?needs to be preserved for a translation 
to be successful, in contrast to some of the approaches, such as 
relevance theory, described by Peter Kirk, pp. 96 ff.) and several 
other points that fall short in their execution.  For example, he explains 
at great length that the word "donkey" has negative connotations in 
Arabic (including, among others, stubbornness and stupidity) which, in 
his opinion, do not exist in English (even going so far as to produce 
evidence in the form of a brochure claiming that donkeys have "a 
distinctly calming influence", p. 164).  In an equally bizarre vein, he 
counsels the English speaking reader not to call an Arab "an owl," as 
this would constitute an insult in the Arab's native language.

The volume concludes with an engaging essay by Manuela Foiera on 
Buddhist terminology in Italy.  Italy is home to a burgeoning community 
of recent converts to Buddhism, particularly the international Soka 
Gakkai sect, which originated in Japan.  Foiera notes that most of the 
terms used by Italian adherents to this sect are borrowed directly from 
Japanese, the (primarily Roman Catholic) Italians being unable (and 
perhaps even unwilling) to press their traditional religious vocabulary 
into the service of a new religion, largely because many of the 
converts to Buddhism did so out of dissatisfaction with the religion of 
their birth.  Nonetheless, the Italian religious sphere bears the imprint 
of Roman Catholicism so strongly that Italian Buddhists find 
themselves faced with a dilemma; either they find themselves adopting 
purely Japanese vocabulary and even social conventions, or 
approach the new religion encumbered with baggage from Roman 
Catholicism.  Neither approach is entirely satisfactory, but a third way, 
somewhere between the Scylla of turning Japanese and the 
Charybdis of aping Roman Catholicism, has not yet arisen.

CONCLUSION

Volumes such as these generally trend towards the eclectic, and 
Translation and Religion is no different in this regard.  Most 
scholarship on translations of religious texts tends to be restricted to a 
single tradition, with little discussion of methodological considerations 
transcending discrete corpora.  The exception which proves the rule 
is, of course, the Bible, shared as it is by Judaism and Christianity.  
Bible studies have engendered a lively debate upon translations and 
hermeneutics within and across these two traditions precisely because 
they share the same text, and for this reason the discussion is rarely 
broadened to encompass other traditions, except insofar as they 
reflect the Biblical tradition (such as Mesopotamian cosmologies, 
relevant to those found in the book of Genesis, or the texts from 
Ugarit, which betray a remarkable similarity to the earliest Biblical 
poetry).  For this reason, a volume such as this, in which material is 
brought together from the disparate religious traditions of the world, is 
a welcome addition to the scholarship.

Conspicuous in their absence, of course, are the traditional 
philologists, who have produced (and continue to produce) the bulk of 
the research on religious texts from these traditions.  Of all the essays 
in this volume, Abdul-Raof's is the most philological; the other essays 
range from wistful nostalgia (Shackle) to dismissiveness (Jasper) in 
their attitudes towards the philologists, the balance ignoring them 
entirely.  As most such scholars have not availed themselves of the 
growing body of work on translation theory, choosing instead to rely 
upon more traditional approaches to the translation of sacred texts, 
this should not surprise us.  Nonetheless, it seems odd that the input 
of these scholars, who are so central to the translation of religious 
texts even today, would not be represented.

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter (1929) The task of the translator.  In Arendt, H. (ed.) 
Illuminations (trans. H. Zohn), 69-82.  New York: Schocken Books.  

Derrida, J. (1987) Psyché. Inventions de l'autre, 203-235.  Paris: 
Galilée. 

Hardwick, Lorna (2000) Translating Words, Translating Cultures.  
London: Duckworth.

Waard, J. de and Nida, E. (1986) From One Language to Another: 
Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating.  Nashville: Thomas 
Nelson.

Vermeer, Hans (1996) A Skopos Theory of Translation.  Heidelberg: 
TEXTconTEXT 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Charles G. Häberl is a PhD candidate at the Department of Near 
Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University.  He is 
currently engaged in fieldwork with speakers of Neo-Mandaic and is in 
the process of writing a descriptive grammar of the dialect of 
Khorramshahr (Iran).  Neo-Mandaic is the modern reflex of the 
liturgical language of the Mandaeans, the last surviving Gnostic 
community from late antiquity.  It is the most conservative of the 
eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects and the only surviving Neo-Aramaic 
dialect with a continuous textual tradition, spanning nearly two 
thousand years.  Charles is interested in the phenomena of language 
death and language contact.





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