Care and Feeding of a Translation Committee

Now we come to an extremely difficult subject. How does the translator get the syntax from one language to another? By the way, syntax is that part of grammar that deals with sentence structure, not something you pay the government for your bad habits! (Just had to say that.:smilewinkgrin

Japanese sentence structure is very different from Greek and Hebrew syntax. Greek often has no subject except that included in the verb endings, but Japanese must have a subject in the sentence. Greek verbs can come various places in the sentences, since there is so much information in the verb prefixes and suffixes, but Japanese predicates come at the end of the sentence. Greek adjectives are well behaved, but can be used as nouns if you add a definite article. However, Japanese adjectives can become either nouns or verbs, depending on the suffix. Greek has many different kinds of participle, but Japanese only has something called the "te form" that is similar to a participle. So how in the world do you get the syntax from one language to another?

A short aside: Just to show you how complicated this can get, I just had to look up the English words for article and participle in my Japanese-English dictionary. Sometimes the English terms just flee my brain!

 

I've been thinking for days, trying to figure out how to explain the workings of a translator's mind when he handles grammar. I hope this explains it.

If you remember your high school and college English grammar without loathing, you remember the kinds of sentences that you were taught: declarative, interrogative and the rest. If you remember your English grammar without wincing, you may remember being taught how to transform a sentence into another type of sentence.

Examples: to make "I threw a ball" into a negative sentence, you say, "I did not throw a ball." To make it a question, "Did I throw a ball?" To make it passive, "The ball was thrown by me." And so on. These changes are called "transformations" in linguistic jargon.

An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics by H. A. Gleason (New York: Holt, Winehart, Winston, 1955; revised ed. 1961) is a classic textbook in the field, and it has a whole chapter on transformations that is worth reading. He points out that "students seem to learn the technique more or less readily" (p. 171). I'll get back to this statement in a minute.

In the 1950s, a linguist named Noam Chomsky developed this idea into a complicated form called transformational grammar (TG), also called generational grammar. This is still taught to this day, and many modern linguists hold to it. The idea is that you can take a language and develop a set of rules in a scientific way about how that language handles transformations. You are then able to carefully examine the grammar of that language.

Now, Chomsky didn't believe TG should be used for translation. However, some translation scholars have advocated this for widely different methods: Eugene Nida for dynamic equivalence in his books on the subject, and James Price for optimal equivalence in his magnum opus A Theory For Biblical Translation: An Optimal Equivalence Model, in which he develops a TG for Hebrew. Heavy stuff, let me tell you!

Now back to that statement that students learn to do transformations fairly easily. This says to me that transformations are a natural part of grammar, hard wired into our brains.

A translator does transformations in his head in two languages and thinks nothing of it. It comes naturally, and the ability may rightly be called a gift of God. So for example, when I read a genitive absolute phrase in Greek, I have set in my mind already how to make that into a "-te form" in Japanese.

More next time about how a committee works grammar transformations.

 

Perhaps the biggest headache in translating grammar is the issue of verbal aspect and time. This is a big controversy right now among Greek scholars, with Stanley Porter leading the aspect crowd and other scholars on the other side.

A brief explanation is in order. Aspect is the action that a verb shows. So in English, if I say "I am sawing a log," that shows continuous action. Time, on the other hand, deals with when the action takes place. Some think that Greek verbs have no temporal component at all. That is, the tenses show only aspect and not time. So the Greek aorist tense, for example, is not talking about past time but only action at a point in time. I disagree strongly. But I digress.

Let's say you are translating an aorist for "to do" into Japanese. The original says, "I will do." So you need a future tense in Japanese--but Japanese doesn't have one! Horrors! What will we do? How will we translate a Greek future tense?

This is where the Kogoyaku erred greatly. This was the first Japanese Bible in modern Japanese, translated after WW2. In translating the Greek future, it used a Japanese potential verb, in which you add the word deshou after the main verb. So for example in Acts 1:11, it has the angel saying, "This same Jesus may come in like manner...." However, for that the Greek uses the future subjunctive, not the regular future indicative. So that translation was widely criticized.

The answer is to look for the grammatical construction that is used in Japanese when speaking about the future is necessary. Now, normally, Japanese are very ambiguous about the future. They don't like to say anything will happen for sure in the future. But years ago I read that if they want to say something solid about the future they use the present tense. So I had a "eureka moment" one day when a lady came to our prayer meeting when she saw our sign. That day I lead her to the Lord, and when she left she said, "I come to church Sunday." And she did! So in translating the NT, it is necessary sometimes to use the present tense for a future event in Japanese.