[B-Greek] Translation Considerations checklist: Suggestions?
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue May 4 07:58:21 EDT 2010
Just a follow-up on my earlier response and after reading Mark's and Iver's responses:
Mark says, "But when we move into the Greek NT we are not in Kansas anymore. No book of the Greek NT is art; none of it was produced by artists. "
Well, it is certainly true that the authors of the NT books are in a different category from the Homeric bards who chanted in the halls of noblemen and before festival audiences at Delos and Olympia. But on the other hand, neither are the NT books in the same category as laundry lists and inventories of storerooms. They are intended to give expression to the foundation narratives of a community of faith and to instruct congregations on the implications of their faith; that is serious business, whether it focuses upon spiritual exposition or ethical instruction, and it moves far beyond the realm of concrete everyday food and drink and business transactions. It is thoughtful, not merely entertaining. Much or most of these books has been composed with care and some of it (several chapters of 1 Corinthians, for instance, including chapters 13 and 15 but also the first four) involve powerful rhetoric. Converting this material will call upon more than simple skills of communication in a translator.
You have shared with me off-list something I suspected: that the class to which you are assigning this exercise has been exposed to a two-week intensive summer course in Beginning Greek and one additional semester and that are trying to help students make the most of computing resources for parsing and analysis of the Biblical Greek text. I mean no disrespect, but I do very much question the value of this limited an exposure to Biblical Greek to prepare students for the translation exercise that you propose. It seems to me to foster a readiness to make use of Greek resources for preaching and teaching when one really is altogether dependent upon the judgment of other interpreters of the Greek rather than upon one's own. Here again I realize that mine is a minority view; thirty years ago I voted against establishing a 2-years of course work in language as an indication of "proficiency" because (a) I don't think proficiency is acquired by most students through two years of course work, and (b) I found no satisfaction in teaching a second-year class of students taking a course in "terminal Latin." You lament this constant attrition of Greek in the seminary yourself, but one must question whether a little dose of Greek can ever be a substitute for knowing the language. How little is too little? I would say: when the little is only enough to let the preacher make questionable allusions to "what the Greek word really means" in a sermon. If the authorities governing the seminaries honestly believe that the Biblical languages are not really important for ministerial candidates, they would do better, I think, to drop them altogether.
CWC
On May 3, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> On May 3, 2010, at 12:56 PM, Mark Hoffman wrote:
>> I am teaching an Advanced Greek class, and I have split the class into
>> translation teams working on translating Luke 16:19-31, the story of the
>> rich man and Lazarus. As one part of the course, we have spent nearly the
>> whole semester working through each verse of the text, doing all the
>> textual, lexical, exegetical ... work.
>> Now I am asking them not to simply translate the Greek but to compose a
>> translation of the text. (In my mine, there is a difference...) I was unable
>> to find any resource that concisely described the types of things I wanted
>> them to keep in mind as they worked. So, I have tried to compose and
>> organize a list of considerations when composing a translation. Here's the
>> introduction I wrote:
>>
>> When translating New Testament Greek into English, we sometimes are seeking
>> simply to confirm the accuracy of an existing English version. Sometimes we
>> can look at the Greek and produce a translation in our mind that reflects
>> our understanding of the text. In the considerations that follow, however, I
>> am trying to note the kinds of things we should be thinking about if we are
>> actually trying to produce a share-able translation. That is, we are trying
>> to produce a translation that is faithful to the original Greek text, will
>> stand independently from our explanation of it, and will communicate
>> effectively to its readers.
>>
>> HERE <http://www.scrollandscreen.com/files/Translation%20Considerations.pdf>is
>> the 3 page PDF of what I pulled together. If anyone is interested enough to
>> read it and comment upon it (corrections, additions, suggestions...), I
>> would be grateful. If you know of a similar sort of list to which you can
>> point me, that would be appreciated too.
>> Thanks.
>
>
> It really should be said, first of all, that translation as such is not a topic on which
> we encourage discussion in this forum since there is a well-established list,
> B-Translation, devoted to that topic:
> https://lists.kastanet.org/Lists/Bible-Translation/List.html
> I think you would do well to put your queries to that list, if you haven't in fact
> already done so.
>
> Yes, I saw this on your blog this morning and immediately downloaded the PDF
> file. I do indeed all the things that you ask students to consider are very much
> worthy of consideration. And yet, and yet -- I find myself disturbed by the
> very prospect of this sort of exercise, perhaps for no very good reason -- and it's
> very likely that other B-Greekers won't agree with what I say -- but I want to say
> it anyway.
>
> I have been retired from teaching Greek for almost a decade; when I was teaching
> it an advanced level I used to ask my students to do two versions: (a) a relatively
> literal version that was just intelligible in English but that endeavored to express
> the student's understanding of the structure of the Greek text, and (b) a version
> expressing in the best English the student could muster the meaning of the Greek
> text as the student understood it.
>
> I now have my doubts about this sort of exercise and its value. I think that
> translation is fundamentally an art and that it can be successful only if the
> translator is a competent and talented literary artist. I am inclined to think that,
> IF there is a value to the sort of exercise you propose, it lies in the lesson to be
> learned by the student about how utterly hopeless the task of translation really is.
>
> Some of us have been voicing our high disregard for the standard "woodenly-
> literal" functional-equivalent version that seems to be the standard "proof-of-
> the-pudding" of successful mastery of first-year Greek skills. I myself have
> repeatedly propounded the view that the objective of instruction in ancient Greek
> must be the ability to understand it and use it as a vehicle of communication
> rather than to convert ancient Greek texts into one's native language as a
> target language.
>
> Some of us have been saying too all translations are in fact interpretations
> or commentaries on the original text, and if μεθερμηνεύειν MEQERMHNEUEIN
> is the Koine word ordinarily glossed as "translate," that would seem to accord
> with the notion that a translation is an interpretation.
>
> So what's the alternative to the classroom exercise in converting a Biblical
> Greek text into one's native language? The more sophisticated tests of English
> comprehension call for the reader to restate in his/her own words the content
> of an English paragraph or two of expository prose or an English narrative .
> I think that the equivalent of that such as perhaps Randall Buth would suggest
> is a restatement of the reader's understanding of a passage of Greek expository
> prose or narrative -- in Koine Greek. That would still be an interpretation,
> of course. It would be at least as challenging as the sort of translation into
> English that you are proposing to your classes. But it might ultimately be
> worth more in terms of enhancing and demonstrating the student's real
> understanding of the text.
>
> I realize that this is not really a response to the question(s) you are raising --
> but the questions which you are raising do point to questions that some
> may think worth raising about the whole orientation of Biblical Greek
> pedagogy. I would expect that several others will respond to your query
> more appropriately and more helpfully with a view to your endeavor.
> of Biblical Greek pedagogy
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>
>
>
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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