Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

God said to Moshe:

I will be-there howsoever I will be-there.

And he said:

Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel:

I AM THERE sends me to you.

And God said further to Moshe:

This shall you say to the Children of Israel:

HE,

the God of your fathers

the God of Avraham, the God

of Yitzhak, and the God of Yaakov,

sends me to you.

That is my name for the ages,

that is my title

generation unto generation.[110]

Both Nida and Buber were concerned with translating from a “language of truth” into a vernacular—both were translating DOWN, as were Luther, Ruyl, and King James’s translators. One major difference among them lies not in the direction of travel but in the broader location of their particular language pairs in the world hierarchy of tongues: Hebrew, German, Dutch, and Malay occupy places that are not interchangeable with one another. But the main difference is what the translators thought their respective audiences needed and desired. For Ruyl, seventeenth-century Sumatrans needed to learn the story and its overall meaning; but in Buber’s mind, what German Jews in the Weimar Republic needed to learn was what the authentic, original community of Jews had believed. These differences produce curious flips and loops in translation history, whose course has been more sinuous than any theory can easily accommodate.

Buber’s “foreignizing” approach is characteristic of those major programs of translations DOWN—from Greek into Syriac, Italian into French, and Latin into most Western languages—that have left lasting imprints on the receiving language. Ruyl’s and Nida’s strongly adaptive approach, on the other hand, is obviously more often found in translations UP—from vernaculars, be they regional or exotic, into central languages that don’t want to know too much about the source. Modern Bible translation has thus produced a reversal of age-old trends.

By insisting on as much respect for the (foreign) target culture as possible, Nida’s recommended style of translating scriptures DOWN applies procedures more commonly found in translations UP; whereas the exoticizing style of Buber (and, after him, of Henri Meschonnic in France), which has been more typically applied to translation DOWN in the last few thousand years, is motivated by scrupulous respect for the radical difference of a now almost inaccessible culture and form of speech.

Both methodologies seek to pay respect where respect is due: there is no conflict in overall motivation. But where Buber has little respect for the linguistic norms of contemporary German, Nida doesn’t think that the specific qualities of snow matter very much when set beside the overriding aim of getting the message across.

The degree to which either of these ideas of translation can affect the receiving language and culture doesn’t really depend on their intrinsic merits as translation methodologies or on the brilliance of their users. It depends on volume. Leaving the special features of Bible translation to the side, we can say that the reciprocal flow of translations between any two languages is never equal and in most cases utterly unbalanced. The direction of flow is the key to understanding which way is UP, and what happens down below.

SIXTEEN Translation Impacts

Some Bible translations have had profound and lasting effects on the receiving language. Luther’s Bible is considered the first monument of modern German, and the King James Bible remains an inescapable reference point in the history of English. However, such impacts are not typical of translation in general. Individual translators do not often produce the smallest ripple in the target culture. However, continuing waves of translated works in particular fields always leave the receiving language in a significantly different shape.

That was clear to Friedrich Schleiermacher when he set out to explain how the Greek classics should best be translated into German. It wasn’t any one book that would make the difference, he insisted, but only large-scale translation of Greek philosophy and drama that could help the German language “to flourish and develop its own perfect power through the most varied contacts with what is foreign.”[111] But depending on the relation between the original and the receiving society, the target may get hit in radically different ways.