It was a challenging task for the ancient translators because

• the source language (SL) belonged to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asia family of languages, but the target language (TL) – to the Indo-European family;

• the biblical text contained different literary forms: prose, poetry, juridical and prophetical texts;

• there were many special cultic terms in the Old Testament which had not their counterparts in Greek;

• the messengers and their audiences lived some centuries before the translators.

 

The problems of grammar and syntax which had been set before the ancient translators:

• Hebrew verbs do not have the grammatical category of tense. • Hebrew syntax is paratactic. • Some grammatical forms may have several meaning (for example, nouns in plural). • Archaisms in vocabulary (including borrowings from Ugaritic, Akkadian and Aramaic), grammar and syntax

• Greek verbs have the complicated tense system.   • Greek syntax is hypotactic. • Clear, well-developed and consecutive derivation system. • Translation of the archaisms demanded from the translator encyclopaedic erudition and great insight.

 

The ancient translator tried to be careful in the translation:

• They rendered each Hebrew lexeme with a corresponding Greek word consequently (אלהים = ο θεος [the God], יהוה = ο κυριος [the Lord], ברא = ποιεω [to create], יצר = πλασσω [to form], משכן = σκηνη [the tabernacle]);

• They attempted to imitate the Hebrew syntax where it was possible (the paratactic syntax, the word order VSO, the syntactic parallelism in poetry);

• They created new words (neologisms) in the cases when they couldn’t find a Greek equivalent for a Hebrew word (for example, the cultic term ιλαστεριον for כפרת [an atonement cover]);

• They used the hypotactic syntactic construction for the infinitive construction in Hebrew and asyndetic relative clauses.

Two approaches to the equivalence in translation: literal and dynamic (functional):

— In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ^2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. — (Gen 1:1-2 KJV)

— When God began creating the heavens and the earth, ^2the earth was a shapeless, chaotic mass, with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors (The Living Bible)

Literal and functional approaches in translation of poetry:

I will sing unto the LORD, /for he hath triumphed gloriously: || the horse and his rider /hath he thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and song, / and he is become my salvation: || he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; /my father's God, and I will exalt him (Exo 15:1-2 KJV)

I will sing to the Lord, /for he has triumphed gloriously; || He has thrown both horse and rider into the sea. The Lord is my strength, my song, and my salvation. || He is my God, and I will praise him. / He is my father’s God—I will exalt him.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 1 in Ukrainian translation by Dmytro Pavlychko

From fairest creatures we desire increase,That thereby beauty's rose might never die,But as the riper should by time decease,His tender heir might bear his memory: But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,Making a famine where abundance lies,Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel: Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,And only herald to the gaudy spring,Within thine own bud buriest thy content,And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding: Pity the world, or else this glutton be,To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Ми прагнем, щоб краса потомство мала, Щоб цвіт її ніколи не зачах, Щоб квітнула троянда нетривала, Все наново постаючи в бруньках.   А ти, закоханий у власну вроду, Її годуєш полум'ям своїм, Розвалюєш - скажи, кому на шкоду? - Душі своєї багатющий дім.   Ти, хто весні сьогодні пишна пара, Пригноблюєш весняне почуття, Як той багатий, та нещасний скнара, Змарновуєш на вбогості життя.   Світ пожалій, не зводь красу до гробу, Віддай природі борг - свою подобу!

 

Translatability (6)

Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leo Waisgerber, Werner Koller and Benjamin Whorf’s concept of linguistic relativity

 

The main idea, which unites all these scholars, is impossibility of adequate translation

• W. Humboldt (1767-1835) believed that adequate translation is unachievable, since behind two different languages stand two different world pictures (archetypes), different cultural connotations of meaning (Letter to K. Schlegel, 1796).

• L. Weisgerber (1899-1985) asserted that each language creates its own “intermediate world” (Zwischenwelt), and a human perceives the world through his / her mother tong; so, translation is an encounter of two worldviews, not only two code-systems.

• W. Koller (born in 1942): if each language states its own “intermediate world”, and translation only transposed content of one language into another language, untranslatability becomes the universal axiom.

Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) thoughtlanguage is not so much a tool through which it is possible to express notions belonging to a culture, as it is a sort of cataloguing system, a systematization of otherwise disorderly knowledge; if two peoples or two persons speak different languages, they often have different world views, not simply different formulations for the same conceptions.

Edward Sapir (1884-1939) was a mentor of Benjamin Whorf at Yale University; in his early writings Sapir held views of the relation between thought and language stemming from the Humboldtian tradition.