Literal or Free

I recently sent an email out to a large number of people. In it I was explaining a bit about our work and what we do when we translate. I was wanting to demonstrate that when translating there is always implied information that the original readers would know but a reader on a small island 2000 years later (like the Amphletts) might not know. The example I gave had to do with Jesus sending two of his disciples to Jerusalem to prepare the passover. They do it and the following verse states that Jesus and the twelve went to the city. One of the men working with me immediately asked, "What happen to the other two who went to Jerusalem? When did they join Jesus and the other ten?" Good question. It's not mentioned in the text. It is assumed the reader would know they must have returned so that the whole group would go together. We added in a short statement that after they did what Jesus had said, they returned. This is the way Gumawana speakers like it. Everyone needs to be accounted for to be a good story.

Someone responded to my email with the question "How are you differentiating what is "literal" translation (nothing added) and what you are adding for clarification sake." People have different ideas of what is literal. What I say is that there is no true literal translation. In fact I would wonder if literal translation is actually an oxymoron. I give as an example a literal translation of Matthew 1:18 from the Greek:

"Of the and Jesus Christ the birth like thus was. Being promised in marriage of mother of him Mary to the Joseph, before or to come together them she was found in stomach having from spirit holy."

How easy was that to read? Would you call that a translation? All translation involves interpretation. If you compare the above with the NASB translation of it you can see some things the translators did to clarify the meaning:

"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit."

Notice that the NASB starts out "when". That word is not even in the Greek. The Greek has "being promised in marriage..." which is a participle. They have interpreted the participle as being temporal in nature and so translate it as "when" to make it clear. They took the Greek idiom "was found in stomach" and clarified as "found to be with child" but they could have made it even clearer by saying either "she was expecting" or really clear "she was pregnant."

Now the reason I said "literal translation" might be considered an oxymoron is this. Here is a definition of "translation" from the program wordweb: "A written communication in a second language having the same meaning as the written communication in a first language." Notice it doesn't say a word by word glossing of one language with another. No, it makes reference to one language having the same meaning. But meaning is conveyed differently from language to language. So if by literal we mean word by word, but the word "translation" has to do with same meaning, we end up with an oxymoron. When we do word by word translating the meaning as in Matthew 1:18 is not going to come through. Another good example of this is Matthew 1:25. The Greek literally says "he [Joseph] did not know her [Mary]." If we translated that into Gumawana according to the words, the meaning is Joseph didn't know whom he married. Is that the intended meaning that Matthew had in mind? No, if we translated the meaning, in Gumawana we have to say, "Joseph didn't sleep with Mary." That conveys the idea that Matthew intended.

So I do put implied information into the Gumawana translation. That is information the readers would derive from the context, information that doesn't need to be stated for various reasons. The author and reader shared a similar language, culture and beliefs so that certain information didn't have to be stated explicitly. But on the Amphletts 2000 years later, that information will not necessarily be understood. Now that doesn't mean we just put in information willy nilly. We start out somewhat on the literal side and ask questions to find out what is clear and not clear. When it isn't clear we find out why. It may be that it will require some implied information to make things understandable. In the example above, I mentioned participles. Gumawana doesn't have participles, so technically a literal translation into Gumawana is impossible for most of the New Testament. But the important thing is not that the Greek uses participles, therefore English or Gumawana should too. The question has to be asked what is the function of the participle? Once that is understood, then we look for grammatical constructions in the target language (Gumawana) that have a similar function. This produces a faithful translation to the meaning.

So the question I would pose is this: Is not the meaning more important than the form?

Postposition in Gumawana

I've been working in the Gumawana language now for about 25 years. I've learned a lot about English by doing so. But I'm also finding that things I at first saw as new and unique about Gumawana I'm taking for granted now. I recently posted an email to our prayer supporters and I mentioned the word "postposition". I hadn't even thought about the fact that people wouldn't know what it was. I did explain it, but I received many emails about it. So I thought I might do a blog on the language a bit.

Some languages are what we call VO meaning that the verb comes before the object, like English. But there are many languages that have the reverse order of OV. Gumawana fits this latter one. So where English would say "John saw Bob," Gumawana says "John Bob saw." I had one person a long time ago ask how a Gumawana person could understand that seeing that it was backwards. Will let that one go for now.

Anyway, there are ramifications for that simple little order. In fact, many languages will follow this pattern with other aspects of the language. I say pattern because what the above really is saying is that in English the important part comes first because the verb is more important than the object. So in Gumawana the most important thing comes last. Universals of language have been proposed that state that if a language is OV it will have what we call postpositions rather than prepositions. A preposition is what we have in English. For example, in English we can say "in the house" or "at night." But in Gumawana the order is "night at" and "the house in". The words "at" and "in" come after the object so are called postpositions since they come after the object.

Gumawana has one very generic postposition goi (pronounced GO-i with i as in machine). What is interesting about Gumawana goi is that it only occurs when the location, time or event marked with goi is considered prominent by the speaker/writer. Usually something more will follow to tell you what it was that happened at that time or place. So if someone said "I went Gumawana goi," he is making the location prominent and there is something important that happened there. But if he says merely "I went Gumawana", what is important is the fact that he went, not the location.

Gumawana adjectives do the same thing. They follow the noun they modify. So English "big house" in Gumawana is vada gagaina "house big-it". The word for "big" has a suffix on it that must agree with the noun for house in number and person.

Languages are fascinating. I hope this helps you to understand a bit more about what goes on in another language.