Oct 08
Communication: the slip and slide of Scripture
There’s a useful post on Better Bibles about the imperfection of human communication. Richard Rhodes notes that:
Language is always vague. It’s just precise enough to solve the speaker’s communicative problem. In everyday life this is mostly below notice. We spend so much time surrounded by people who are on the same wavelength that we don’t notice how much verbal shorthand there is.
and then:
The problem comes when we’re so far removed from the writer of a text that we can’t be sure we’re on the same wavelength. This is the essential problem with reading the Bible, in whatever translation.
And I’m sorry but literal translations are no guarantee of accuracy in this regard. In fact, this whole blog is about showing that literal translations effectively lie to us. They make us think we’re on the same wavelength as the authors, when they lead us away.
I somewhat disagree with the last paragraph: I think that dynamic equivalence translations are even more deceptive, because they so often render the Scriptures in such idiomatic English that we can be tempted into forgetting the huge gulf – the invisible cultural text – between the modern translation and the original text. But the main point remains well taken: we don’t notice how much is unsaid in our communication.
Consider this simple exchange:
Woman: “Do you fancy a Chinese?”
Man: “You know I’ve got high blood pressure.”
To make sense of that we need to know not only colloquial uses of the words “fancy” and “a Chinese”, but also that Chinese meals are often high in salt, and that salt is often considered to exacerbate high blood pressure. How likely is it that we would know all the contexts necessary to make full sense of such an exchange from 2000 years ago?
Now on the whole, our attempts at written communication are more thought through, less colloquial and more coherent than this, but all if us know how often we still get misunderstood. As Eliot said:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.1
“Language is imprecise” is a mantra that should probably be said at least ten times before engaging in Bible study.
Notes- Four Quartets ‘Burnt Norton’ V [↩]
October 8th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
“Language is imprecise” is a mantra that should probably be said at least ten times before engaging in Bible study.
and a mantra that should be shown too:
Now on the whole, our attempts at written communication are more thought through, less colloquial and more coherent than this, but all if us know how often we still get misunderstood.
all if us know what you meant to write! Thanks for the communication! The slip and the slide (if and of Scripture).
October 8th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Good catch - I shall let that error stand as witness to the ways in which badly used language is enough to get the message over.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:26 am
We do need to talk about the difference between the lies of literal translations and the lies of dynamic equivalent translations. All translations lie (since I’ve gotten us stuck with that metaphor). This is why Ortega y Gasset thought literary translation was impossible. (See my blog from April of ‘06 http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/04/sins-of-omission.html) (Sorry, I don’t know how to tag this.) My point is that all translators and interpreters between living languages know that dynamic equivalent translations are the only ones that are acceptable.
What I mean by pointing this out is that when we’re talking about the Bible we can’t tell whether dynamic equivalents lie more than literal ones or vice versa. But we can tell between modern languages, even very culturally remote ones. And dynamic equivalents are SO much more faithful that literal translations don’t even show up on the radar.
October 10th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
[...] Doug: Communication: the slip and slide of Scripture [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Rich writes:
My point is that all translators and interpreters between living languages know that dynamic equivalent translations are the only ones that are acceptable.
And I interpret Rich’s statement as meaning also:
that “dynamic equivalent translations are the only ones that are acceptable by Rich, by someone else, by any other human being who must interpret.”
Translators call Rich’s statement (and our “interpretation” of it): an inevitable “dynamic equivalence” between what he stated and what we make of it.
Rhetoricians call Rich’s statement: “enthymematic.”
Feminists call Rich’s statement: “an intrinsically social act” (as per Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons, page 129).
Comparative Literary types call Rich’s statement: “create[ed] tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of interlinear translation between the host and the guest languages,” (as in Lydia H. Liu’s Translingual Practice, page 40 at least).
The sharp point to (for us humans to try to) abstract is this:
that it takes more than one of us to translate, and we each give a bit more to that process and the other may want to receive.
As if that’s not enough, I’ve blogged on this recently. How would you interpret that: “An Inconvenient Truthiness”?