Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translating DOWN from a dominant to a vernacular language is typically accompanied by substantial imports of vocabulary and syntactic constructions from the source. Such was the process that enriched and expanded Syriac when it was used as a vehicle for the preservation of Greek medicine and astronomy. Such was the process that altered and enhanced French when it became the target language for mass translation from Italian in the sixteenth century. Such was the process that Schleiermacher strongly recommended for German as the recipient of the treasures of Greek philosophy in the early nineteenth century. Target-language modification was also, in fact, the fate of English at the hands of the translation committee established by King James I. “The Lord Our God,” for instance, is less a Jacobean way of expressing the first-person plural possessive in English than it is a calque of Hebrew grammar: the corresponding expression in the Torah, , pronounced “adonai ilehenu,” can be worded out as “God, the Lord-Our.”

The spread of English-language terms in the field of electronic communications into almost all the vehicular languages of the world (computer, Internet, to surf, hardware, USB, and so forth) is a contemporary reminder of what a language hierarchy is. The French would rather not be so reminded, and their government set up the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie in 1996 to push back the tide of foreign words. It may have more success than King Canute, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Target-language modification through translations of prestigious works from a language of higher status may in some instances be imposed on the receiving cultures, but in most cases it is not. More characteristically, it arises from the wishes and needs of the translating community itself. (It hardly needs pointing out that there were no “Hebrews” around to spur King James’s translators to bend English into shapes more typical of Hebrew grammar.) But Bible translation in the twentieth century is a different kettle of fish. The agents of modern Bible translation into indigenous languages are closely involved in the missionizing project itself, and many of them are American as well.

They work into languages they have learned long after the critical age of language acquisition—they are what we termed L2 translators see here of this book. They therefore run the same kind of risk of creating unintentionally comical or offensive effects as do the creators of international signage in Croatian seaside hotels. Nida’s main concern was to try to ensure they did not.

Bible translation into non-European languages, which began with European colonial expansion as early as the seventeenth century, was highly inventive from the start. Albert Cornelius Ruyl, a junior trader in the Dutch East India Company with unusual linguistic skills, first taught himself Malay—a regional contact language—when he began his service in Sumatra. He wrote a grammar, then translated the Gospel of Matthew from Dutch. Ruyl altered and adapted Malay as he went along, using words from Arabic, Portuguese, and Sanskrit when he knew no corresponding term in Malay. But he also did something more.

Where the Dutch version of Matthew talks of a fig tree, Ruyl’s version has pisang—which means a banana tree in Malay. The substitution was justified by the fact that there were no figs on Sumatra. But what really marks it as special is that it signals a new ideology in the age-old business of translating DOWN. Ruyl initiated the principle of cultural substitution that Nida would theorize and promote three centuries later.

From Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Syriac into Arabic, and so forth, when the receiving language didn’t have a word for some item, it got a new one—the word of the source language, adapted to its new linguistic home. Not so from Dutch into Malay. The receiving language did not get a new word for a new thing. It got a substitute thing, with its existing word.