Translation and Religion

Holy Untranslatable?

Lynne Long

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781853598166
• eBook ISBN: 9781847695505
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Traduzione e interpretariato

This volume addresses the methods and motives for translating the central texts of the world's religions and investigates a wide range of translation challenges specific to the unique nature of these writings. Translation theory underpins the methodology for the analysis of a variety of scriptures and brings important and sensitive issues of translation to the fore.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Translating Holy Texts

LYNNE LONG

Motives for translating holy texts have been many and various, ranging from the evangelical to the curious, the subversive to the celebratory. But what exactly is it that defines a text as holy? And what is it about that holiness that makes translation difficult or even impossible? And when the impossible necessity of translation is forced on us, how do translators go about it?

In the 21st century it is politically and socially impossible to ignore holy texts from other cultures. The writings of postcolonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha and Tejaswini Niranjana, and of systems theorists, such as Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury, have been used as frameworks within which to discuss issues arising from the translation of holy texts. Postcolonial criticism has been one of the tools used for understanding the complexity of translating religious texts into colonised cultures. Bhabha, for example, has coined the term ‘evangelical colonialism’ (Bhabha, 1994: 34) to refer to processes of ideological and religious colonisation by imperial powers. Systems theory is particularly useful for understanding the position of translated holy texts in other cultures. Even-Zohar uses the term ‘cultural interference’ (Even-Zohar, 2001: section 1) to refer to the domestication and absorption by the target culture of parts of the source society’s cultural repertoire. With the rise in migration and diasporas, holy texts are increasingly coming into contact with other cultures and becoming a means of introducing different religious ideas to new audiences. Bhabha’s and Even-Zohar’s conceptual terms give scholars a critical vocabulary with which to articulate such linguistic and cultural confrontations.

Any cultural contact, ‘interference’ or exchange requires translation, particularly in the area of what each culture holds as sacred or holy. But the holy resists translation, since the space it needs in the target language is often already occupied; available vocabulary is already culturally loaded with indigenous referents. The task of this book is to try to make sense of a cultural interface that requires translation, but at the same time defies it. The search for a new spirituality, the pursuit of truth or simply a dissatisfaction with organised religion have made alternative holy texts the subject of scrutiny over past centuries. Today the necessity to understand how other cultures work in order to live peacefully together makes them required reading and their sympathetic translation crucial.

Translated texts of all kinds, and particularly holy texts, have helped to shape cultures throughout history. The cultural heritage of Europe and the United States has been fashioned almost exclusively by the influence of Judeo-Christianity until the present century. As a consequence, translation theorists who work in this geographical area are used to regarding scripture as synonymous with the Bible. It is interesting that some of the most influential pieces of 20th-century writing about translation use as a metaphor for translation a story from the Old Testament of the Bible. The Book of Genesis Chapter 11:1-9 tells how the people of Earth originally belonged to one tribe and spoke one language. When they began to build a tower to consolidate their power, God confounded this activity by causing confusion, making them all speak different languages.

In ‘Des Tours de Babel’ Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and deconstructor of philosophical texts, engages with the legacy of Babel. In Derrida’s reading, the divine dismantling of both the tower and the single language implies the impossibility of reconstructing either (Derrida, 1985: 171). Conversely the creation of many languages makes translation necessary. As Derrida says, God ‘at the same time imposes and forbids translation (Derrida, 1985: 170).’ The confusion caused by the events at Babel reflects the confusions surrounding both the act and the processes of translation. The translator works to restore communication when God has decreed it should be destroyed, thereby working against God. There is confusion also in the plurality of languages making up God’s text: confusion in the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations to be gathered from languages. Plurality is illustrated in the many possible readings of the French words of Derrida’s essay title ‘Des Tours de Babel’, usually left untranslated and thereby validating many of his claims. Since the plural form of the definite article obscures the gender of the noun, ‘des tours’ can mean ‘some tricks’, ‘some turns’ or ‘some trips around’ in addition to the primary meaning of ‘of the towers’, ‘about towers’ or ‘some towers’. Then the sound of ‘des tours’ is the same as ‘détours’, deviation from the path or even deconstruction of the tower. Is this why there is so much controversy about holy text translation? There are so many possible interpretations of the truth, so many possible versions of God’s words. Is this why holy texts resist translation?

What is interesting about Derrida’s perspective from the point of view of holy texts is his idea that God effectively resisted the imposition of a single power and a single language (and a single truth?). Babel therefore obliges us to confront a multiplicity of interpretations, to address languages and holy texts other than our own if we are to see a complete world picture: this collection of essays is an attempt to do that. We may still be confused as to whether Babel validates or even celebrates translation as an activity; what we do know is that there exists the possibility of multiple translations of God’s text(s) and that these will be imperfect. We can rely only on Augustine’s optimistic comment ‘in fact this diversity has helped rather than impeded understanding, if readers would only be discerning’ (Gavigan, 1966: 74).

In the same article, Derrida critiques Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (‘The Task of the Translator’) and challenges his idea that the translation of poetic or sacred texts is not always about communication with the reader. Benjamin sees translatability as one of the inherent qualities of a classic text, since translation ensures a text’s afterlife and therefore its survival. Awork that can be identified as a classic has within it the potential to be translated. Translation is crucial to the idea of the survival through time of any text, but becomes particularly important when the text relies for its status on its ancient authority, as most holy texts do. Benjamin identifies an unsettling characteristic of the translation process. ‘In its afterlife’, he says,’ ... the original undergoes a change’ (Benjamin, 1968: 73). Holy text translators looking for divine guidance in the texts they translate do not want to enter into the idea of change through translation.

George Steiner, on the other hand, sees translation’ as implicit in the most rudimentary communication’ (Steiner, 1998: 496). Steiner’s seminal work After Babel systematically explores translation as a process of interpreting and understanding against a background of complex linguistic interplay. The hermeneutic motion, the process of transferring meaning, the challenge of Babel, is exposed with all its complications and pitfalls. Steiner’s view of Babel’s legacy does not make easy reading for the holy text translator as it confirms the multiplicity of possible interpretations. What it does give is support for a contextual approach - linguistic analysis and cultural context combined. At the end of the book, Steiner reflects on what he calls the ’internationalisation’ of English, in other words English used synthetically as a language of communication but dislocated from its cultural base. The same kind of dislocation inevitably occurs with ancient holy texts when translated, since the language in which they were written is removed from its original setting and from all the accompanying referents and associations of memory and cultural context. Restoring the context is one of the most difficult things for a translator to do. Steiner is ambivalent about solutions to this particular translation problem. ‘It would be ironic,’ he says, ‘if the answer to Babel were pidgin and not Pentecost’ (Steiner, 1998: 495).

Derrida’s philosophical ideas on language, Benjamin’s notion of translation as afterlife and Steiner’s conception of meaning and understanding in relation to translation, all directly or indirectly inform many of the articles in this volume. Their ideas have had considerable influence on the direction that translation studies as a discipline have taken, and have proved a useful framework against which to set investigations into translation processes.

In the 21st century, translation models can no longer be confined to Christian cultures: in these times of global travel and cultural exchange, most societies have experienced the cultural interference that exposes and converts them to other ways of living and by extension to other scriptures. This interface is essential for the growth of a society; Even-Zohar (2001: 3) writes,’no culture could manage without interference at one time or another during its history’. Migration, displacement and colonisation have combined to upset geographical models of religious distribution and to bring a greater variety of holy texts to the attention of a wider audience. The physical translation of a community from one place to another eventually requires the translation of the community’s holy texts into the host target language as generations integrate into the host society. Equally the missionary/colonising dynamic has resulted in translation in the opposite direction: texts imposed on the host language from outside.

At the same time, translation studies as a discipline has also taken directions in addition to the familiar linguistic models. Using as a basis language studies such as that of Noam Chomsky (1957) and E.C. Catford (1965), Eugene Nida developed a contextualised approach to holy text translation, offering what he first described as’dynamic equivalence’ as a possible alternative to the old paradigm of word-for-word faithfulness to the source text. The concept of dynamic or functional equivalence as it came to be called, gave Nida’s holy text translators the possibility of different routes through the cultural maze (Nida, 1964). The status of the text made functional equivalence in the context of Bible translation a step too far for some theological commentators such as David Cloud (2001), who were concerned with auctoritas and with authenticity. Nevertheless, the expansion of translation from linguistics into the realms of philosophy and cultural theory opened up new and useful perspectives.

The ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990) expressed the realisation that linguistic models were insufficient to account for translation processes and altered the way that the translation of literary texts was approached by giving the cultural context at least equal footing with the linguistic context. Mary Snell-Hornby was foremost in putting forward the concept of interdisciplinarity in translation theory (Snell-Hornby, 1994, 1995, 1997). Linguistic theories had not provided satisfactory strategies to cope with areas such as the translation of metaphor or ideologically layered texts - areas that abound in holy texts. If communication of meaning is a priority, cultural equivalence may sometimes offer the best solution. Layers of exegesis accumulate over time in any canonical literary work; these are theologically entrenched in scripture. The change implied in translation cannot easily be made if a shift in interpretation is likely to follow. Moreover holy texts are attended by culturally or liturgically specific terms; these linguistic spaces are often already occupied in the target language. How then does the translator proceed without implying a distance from or closeness to the target language terms already in place?

The ‘cultural turn’ generated interest not only in contextualising translations but also in putting the act of translation itself into a social and literary context. The ongoing development of polysystem research by Even-Zohar (1978, 2000, 2001) supported and refined by Gideon Toury (1997) examines translation as a socio-cultural activity, a means of promoting a language of limited diffusion or of building up a culture, or both. Toury cites the early 20th-century example of the Friesians in the Netherlands whose focus on the marketability and status of desirable texts led them to translate the Bible and modern classics of children’s literature as a first step towards renewing and elevating Friesian culture. There are other, earlier examples. It can be no coincidence that both the Bible and Boethius’ Philosophiae Consolationis (a high-status Latin text) were translated into Catalan (spoken in north-eastern Spain) between 1470 and 1480.

Scriptures are usually identified as central to their literary polysystem. Whether they are translations or not, they quickly assume the status of original. André Lefevere’s early work on central texts and cultures (1992b: 71) and on patronage (1992a: 11) encouraged the closer investigation of issues such as the selection and marketing of texts, text ownership, publishers, authorship and copyright (Venuti, 1998a). Holy texts have the complication of institutional claims: the hierarchical structure supporting each religion expects to control the translation of its central text(s), at least in relation to their distribution among the faithful (Stine, 2004: 128–30). In 1963 during the Second Vatican Council when liturgy in the vernacular instead of Latin was approved for use in Catholic Churches, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) was formed. The members are appointed by the Vatican, which regularly issues documents advising on the manner of translating both the Scriptures and the Liturgy. Here is an extract from Liturgicam Authenticam, a document on the use of the vernacular in the liturgy:

... it is to be kept in mind from the beginning that the translation of the liturgical texts of the Roman Liturgy is not so much a work of creative innovation as it is of rendering the original texts faithfully and accurately into the vernacular language. While it is permissible to arrange the wording, the syntax and the style in such a way as to prepare a flowing vernacular text suitable to the rhythm of popular prayer, the original text, in so far as possible, must be translated integrally and in the most exact manner, without omissions or additions in terms of their content, and without paraphrases or glosses. Any adaptation to the characteristics or the nature of the various vernacular languages is to be sober and discreet. (Vatican online; also on Adoremus, the website for the Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy)

The American Bible Society frequently engages with the theoretical and linguistic problems of translation, and is committed to ‘providing translations of the Holy Scriptures that are faithful to the original wording of the original language Biblical texts’ (American Bible Society online). The overriding concerns of both organisations are faithfulness to the original and doctrinal consistency. A new translation can be a serious means of challenging the orthodox readings of a holy text (Long, 2001:141; Venuti, 1998a: 83) or the means of creating a new cultural identity through separation from the established traditions. Political correctness, racism, anti-establishment views, anti-feminism and many other areas of contention may be expressed through the choices available during the process of translation. Small wonder that hierarchies exert close control.

Not all holy texts come within institutional settings. Historically a proprietorial stance impeded both access and translation; in modern times this has in some cases been reduced and replaced by the vagaries of commerce and patronage in the shape of the publisher. The Internet has also to some extent militated against exclusivity. In many areas of religion, however, there remains the notion of an ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ version or translation of the relevant holy text. Approved or enthusiastic followers of the faith therefore perform translations for the faithful: academics perform them for their own research or as part of a programme initiated by a publisher ready to exploit a particular market.

Holy texts positioned on the periphery of a culture’s literary polysystem tend to be treated with more latitude than those centrally placed, and receive correspondingly less attention in translation terms unless some specific reason arises. Political confrontation with nations of other religious beliefs or internal evangelisation might cause temporary interest in the translation and publication of relevant holy texts. The influx of refugees or migrants may be the future catalyst for the translation of formerly peripheral holy texts into the host language. The situation ebbs and flows through history as people migrate through the world. People have a tendency to be so closely bound up in what is happening in their small corner that they find it hard to relate to the shifts in other areas and it comes as something of a shock to confront different ideologies. The question of text ownership and authorship, its position in the source and target polysystem, the motive for translating, the translator’s ideology, the way the text is marketed and its intended readership, all have a bearing on the way in which translation is approached.

Given the intricacies of the translation process, readers of holy texts need to be aware of the kinds of shifts and processes that may have taken place. Translation practitioners and theorists are in the unique position of being able to access the content of holy texts with some und...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Translating Holy Texts Lynne Long
• Part 1: The Wider Picture
• Part 2: Specific Studies
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index