Alternative Paradigms for Bible Translation Hospitality as Hosting the Holy Spirit Tom McCormick (6 / 2023 – 1 / 2024) I was a stranger and you did not invite me in – Matthew 25:43 Do not neglect to show hospitality* to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares – Hebrews 13:2 *φιλοξενία philoxenia: hospitality, love of strangers Therefore welcome* {receive, accept) one another as Christ has welcomed* you, for the glory of God – Romans 15:7 *προσλαμβάνω proslambanó: to take in; receive into one's home, with the collateral idea of kindness; grant one access to one's heart; to take into friendship and contact “Linguistic hospitality, then, where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house” – Paul Ricoeur All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work1 – 2 Timothy 3:16 “Beauty awakens the soul to act” -- Dante Alighieri
PART 1 - AN ALTERNATIVE PARADIGM I.
INTRODUCTION
Increasingly the metaphor (or paradigm) of hospitality is being proposed as an alternative to equivalence as the guiding (and ruling) goal of translation, as well as informing how to proceed with a translation project. The equivalence paradigm has been increasingly challenged. Fundamentally, there is a problem with the notion of equivalence as applied to translations: for a Source or Start Text (ST) and a Host Text (HT) to be equivalent there must be an agreed upon standard of comparison, some “neutral” or third. The dilemma is the following: in a good translation, the two texts, source and target, must be matched with one another through a third non-existent text. Indeed, the problem is saying the same thing or claiming to say the same thing in two different ways. But this same thing, this identical meaning is not given anywhere in the manner of a third text, …. In the absence of this third text, where the actual meaning would lie, the semantic original, there is only one recourse, i.e. the critical reading of a few, if not polyglot then at least bilingual, specialists, critical reading equivalent to a private retranslation, where our capable reader redoes the work of translation, for his own purposes, taking on, in turn, the test of translation and meeting with the same paradox of an equivalence without adequacy (OT 6f; ST 23). In short, the claim of equivalence is only the claim that the translator’s understanding or interpretation of the meaning of the ST is the best or right one, or at least better than any others for the explicit or implicit purposes of the translation. In the absence of an independent standard of comparison, the meaning of equivalence is radically undefined. It would be like, within relativity theory, to say two rods are of equal 1
I would assume that “every good work” includes the translation of the Bible.
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