Holy Scriptures' Translation

Holy Scriptures' Translation

by Riana Irawati

A. "The Spread of Revealed Religions in West Africa and Its Implication for the Development of Translation"

Adewuni Salawu (2007) in his essay, "the Spread of Revealed Religions in West Africa and Its Implication for the Development of Translation" discussed about the improvement of West African linguistic tradition. The linguistic tradition in the western part of the continent developed as two big religions spread their teachings to the continent's local settlers through two different contacts, namely Saharan contact and Atlantic contact. The Saharan contact covers the west area of West Africa, Egypt for example. Moslem preachers introduce the Islamic teaching as well as culture to the westen part of West Africa's inhabitants. As a result, the local culture was replaced by the Arabic tradition. The West African who used to communicate in oral language should learn how to write God's saying, so they develop new written language tradition. They write what God says in Arabic letters and Arabic is assumed as the purest way to convey the message of God, therefore the translation of what God says cannot be performed since the translation of the authentic version of His saying will cause misinterpretation to the literal meaning of the text. In other part of the continent, Christian evangelists spread the Christian teachings to local settlers. After changing the oral tradition to the written one, the evangelists use translation as a mean to convey the message of God to local settlers. Then, Salawu (2007: 33) concluded his paper with:

By adapting the two religions of the Book to West Africa, literacy spreads and the skill of reading and writing were taught. While Islam preserved the sacred words of the Quran in Arabic and favored the use of loanwords in local languages, Christianity instead applied the Roman script into native language, enhancing them to a written level.

In my essay, I will not justify whether or not it is correct to translate a religion's sacred scripture into other languages. As a matter of fact, Moslems nowadays do translate Holy Qur'an in other languages to help the religion's common believers, who do not really well-acquainted to Arabic, to grab the meaning of its holy verses while preserving the authentic version in Arabic. I will discuss on whether the holy scriptures translators do the translation by finding word for word equivalence or sense for sense equivalence and what seems to be the most common problem faced by the holy scriptures' translators.

B. Word for Word or Sense for Sense?

The concept of word for word and sense for sense translation was introduced by Munday (2001). Word for word translation equals to literal translation. In doing this, a translator will find the TL equivalence for each word in SL. The other way of translating is by doing sense for sense translation / free translation. When a translator does a sense for sense translation, he will paraphrase what is said in local language and convey it in his own word. When we date back a translation era before the twentieth century (the pre-linguistic era), we will see that many well-known translators like Cicero, Horace, St. Jerome, Yuhanna Ibn al Batriq, Ibn Na'ima al Himsi, Ibn Ishaaq and Al Jawahari - the latter four are from Abbasid period (750-1250) - applies free / sense for sense approach to translate some texts, including Bible. The reason for applying the sense for sense approach was stated by Cicero in Munday (2001). Cicero prefers being an orator, who conforms the idea and form of SL to common expression used in TL, to being an interpreter, who keeps the same idea and form in TL. Literal translation will result in a static, monotonous translation. The expressions used by applying such method will be strange for the TL users. Sense for sense translation, therefore, will be more suitable for translating literary text and holy scriptures.

C. Translating Metaphors

The common problem of translating holy scripture