Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Into the New Millennium: The Changing Face of Bible Translation

The first few years of the new millennium have seen the continuation and even the acceleration of the major societal and demographic changes1 begun in the final decade of the twentieth century. Those years also saw ferment in the academic world and the emergence and growth of new disciplines, none less so than in the fields of cognitive sciences and communication studies. The theory and practice of Bible translation has not been immune to these developments.

Bible Translation: Factors Affecting Theory and Practice
Translation does not take place in a vacuum. Not only are there societal factors to consider, there are developments in biblical studies, linguistics and the social sciences.

1. Explosion of translation sciences.2 Translation theory developed from translating the Bible into languages around the world was a leader in the field fifty years ago. This is no longer so. As the world has grown smaller in the last twenty-five years, there has been massive growth in translation studies.

2. Developments in the social sciences. The growth in translation studies has been paralleled by developments in communication studies,3 cognitive studies, anthropology4 and linguistics.5 The new understandings of human interaction generated by these sciences may provide tools to carry Bible translation to a new level.

3. Developments in biblical studies.6 There have been new developments in biblical studies, many of which have relevance for translation. With the contribution of the social sciences, biblical exegesis is now much more inter-disciplinary. The understanding of the Bible as literature is of particular importance.7 The areas of developments can be summarised as follows:

  • Text. Septuagint studies, exegesis, canonical studies
  • Texture. Socio-rhetorical studies
  • Context. Sociocultural settings
  • Pretext. Ideology.

4. Translation and technology. In our globalised world, translation needs have seen exponential growth8 and it is no surprise that computer power has been harnessed by the translation industry; still, the goal of fully automatic translation remains elusive. Yet there have been major advances: translation memory tools, corpus linguistics (including text types and genres), electronic corpora and “term banks,” an intralingual approach to translation based on syntactic structures.9