Discussion Details
| Title: | Jerome's Self-Contradiction on Bible Translation |
| Submitter: | Hanjin Yan |
| Description: | We are students of translation at Shandong University in Jinan, PR China. A
few days ago we submitted a discussion titled 'St Jerome Contradicts Himself on Bible Translation'. Since then we have received many kind and valuable responses from people around the world. We would like to express our gratitude to all of them and the LINGUIST List. Based on the responses we received, we would like to expand our question a little bit by adding the following information: The letter to Pammachius is to a great extent a defense of Jerome's own translation. He first openly advocates sense-for-sense translation to justify himself, but makes Bible translation an exception (in Bible translation, he said, he adopts word-for-word translation). However, in the later part of the same letter, he contradicts himself by calling for his critics' attention to the 'substance' rather than the 'literal words'. We have a surmise that the contradiction is, in fact, an unintentionally revelation of Jerome's true stance in the strategy of Bible translation. We infer that Jerome adopts a sense-for-sense strategy for Bible translation (in comparison with his predecessors and contemporaries), but to avoid being in conflict with the churches (which, as Jeremy Munday indicated, might charge him of heresy for altering the sense of Bible), he makes a cautious yet contradictory statement. Since we do not know Greek, we do not know whether Jerome's translation style of the Bible is consistent with his translation of other types of texts, which are sense-for-sense translation in his own definition. We are seeking for comments on our deduced views. The following quotes from St Jerome's letter to Pammachius, #57(395) may make our point more explicit: "Now I (Jerome) not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the Greek - except of course in the case of Holy Scripture, where even the syntax contains a mystery - I render, not word for word, but sense for sense." This is a frequently quoted statement in the study of western translation history, e.g. Jeremy Munday's Introducing Translation Studies. "... so that my (Jerome's) critics may ... realize that in dealing with the Bible one must consider the substance and not the literal words." This statement in the later part of the same text seems to be neglected by most scholars, and we discovered it in our reading of Paul Carroll's translation of the letter. The same sentence translated by Kathleen Davis goes "so my (Jerome's) detractors may themselves inquire and understand that in Scripture one must consider not the words, but the sense." The translated text can be found in Western Translation Theory: from Herodotus to Nietzsche, p. 22-31, edited by Douglas Robinson, or The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, p. 21-30, edited by Lawrence Venuti. Thank you. To read previous threads in this discussion, please visit: http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-2047.html |
| Date Posted: | 07-May-2010 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Translation |
| Language Specialty: |
Greek, Ancient
Hebrew, Ancient Latin |
| LL Issue: | 21.2140 |
| Posted: | 07-May-2010 |
