What Is Translation Anyway?
WHAT IS TRANSLATION ANYWAY?
In considering the work of the King James translators, we need to give careful consideration to what they understood the task of translation to involve. These issues are addressed by Miles Smith, writing on behalf of the whole body of translators in the important preface entitled “The Translators to the Reader,” and need to be given careful weight.
We have already noted some of the issues that are of importance here—for example, the decision not to translate each Hebrew or Greek word with exactly the same English word or phrase in every case. While this unquestionably led to a more elegant English translation, issues of accuracy inevitably arose. For example, the same Hebrew word—khiydah—is translated in a number of different ways, including “riddle” (Judges 14:12–17; Ezekiel 17:2), “hard question” (1 Kings 10:1), “dark saying” (Psalm 49:5; Proverbs 1:6), and “dark sentence” (Daniel 8:23).
However, it must be pointed out here that the Hebrew word khiydah is relatively uncommon. Even though the King James translators stated from the outset that they intended to reserve the right to offer more than one English rendering of cognate words where they believed this was appropriate, it is significant that the King James Bible remains the most cautious and conservative of the Renaissance translations in this matter. Tyndale and the Geneva Bible, for example, showed little attention to the issue of what we might term “verbal equivalence;” the King James translators moved much closer to the notion of providing set formulas for translating the more common original terms and phrases, as determined by their context.
It is clear that the translators of the King James Bible used a formal approach to translation, which required each word of the original to be translated into its closest English equivalent. Approaches to translation can be broadly broken down into two groups—those that place emphasis on the donor language—that is, the language in which the work is originally written—and those that give priority to issues concerning the receptor language (the language into which the translation is taking place).
A careful study of the way in which the King James Bible translates the Greek and Hebrew originals suggests that the translators felt obliged to:
Ensure that every word in the original was rendered by an English equivalent;
Make it clear when they added any words to make the sense clearer, or to lead to better English syntax. These words were originally indicated in roman type, the remainder of the biblical text being typeset in black letter type. In more recent times, they are indicated by italics, following a precedent set by the Geneva Bible in 1560.
Follow the basic word order of the original wherever possible.
This general approach to translation can be shown to have been widespread in the late Middle Ages. The Wycliffite translations of the Latin Bible are exceedingly literal, perhaps reflecting a belief that the sacred quality of the text could be reproduced only in a word-for-word translation. For example, Hebrews 1:1–2 read as follows in the Latin version of the Bible, known by Wycliffe:
The Wycliffite version of this follows the Latin word for word, leading to a translation that is literally accurate, but not particularly good English:
Manyfold and many manners sometime God speaking to fathers and prophets, at the last in these days spake to us in the son; whom he ordained heir of all things, by whom he made and the worlds.
This can be seen especially in the way the Latin phrase et secula is translated literally as “and the worlds,” where the Latin is actually idiomatic, and should be rendered as “also the worlds.”
In his 1598 translation Seven Books of the Iliad, George Chapman set out what he regarded as being the ideal approach to be adopted by a translator.
The worth of a skilful and worthy translator is to observe the sentences, figures and forms of speech proposed in his author, his true sense and height, and to adorn them with figures and forms of oration fitted to the original in the same tongue to which they are translated: and these things I would gladly have made the questions of whatsoever my labours have deserved.
These comments date from only a few years before the companies of translators began their work, and there is little doubt that Chapman's comments reflect the scholarly consensus of his day on this important matter. The hallmarks of a translation are thus fidelity to the original, both in terms of content and style, mingling technical precision with an awareness of the challenges and opportunities afforded by the language into which translation was to take place. The translator of the English Renaissance was thus not merely a verbal mechanic, but one who was concerned to achieve and retain elegance in the resulting translation.
Some such understanding is found in the King James Bible, which retains the word order of the original to a remarkable extent, while still making allowances for the need for the resulting text to be, in the first place, recognizably English, and in the second, intelligible. The King James translators seem to have taken the view—which corresponds with the consensus of the day—that an accurate translation is, by and large, a literal and formal translation.
One of the results of this important decision is that a significant number of essentially Hebrew ways of speaking became incorporated into the English language (see page 231). This approach to translation has resulted in the receptor language being enriched by idioms drawn from the donor language. For this reason, the King James Bible has had a highly significant impact on the development of the English language—a matter that deserves to be considered in much greater detail.
6 It must also be pointed out—although this is a somewhat technical matter—that the textus receptus is not to be directly identified with the Byzantine text, the form of text that established itself during the period of ecclesiastical and theological consolidation in the eastern Roman Empire from the fourth century onward.