Biblical translation: do different strategies produce divergent texts?

What it is about

The paper asks whether the strategy a Bible translator chooses (a word-for-word or "sacred" strategy, a sense-for-sense strategy, or a reader-oriented strategy) makes the translated texts differ in meaning. The authors first give a short history from Jerome through Luther and Casiodoro de Reina to Fray Luis de León, then compare three Spanish and German versions of the Song of Songs: Fray Luis de León's, Reina's and Luther's. They judge meaning, literalness and readability. Their finding is that all three readers would grasp almost the same sense; the strategies differ in literalness and in how plain the language is. Divergence appears only where a translator forces the text into everyday speech and so reads an interpretation into a single term, such as Luther's rendering of Luke 1:28 that avoids "full of grace". The evidence is a close reading of a few passages, not counts.

Ideas

I1. Measure divergence where it is produced: after reading two translations into meta-tokens, count the concepts where they differ, and split the count into single-word choices and systematic patterns. Run it per author pair on the verse-aligned Bible sets and report both counts, twice.
I2. Treat a term that one author renders with a theologically loaded word as a delta candidate: the rule that keeps an author delta when it fixes at least three more tokens and holds in half the context should flag such overrides, and the result should be checked against the paper's examples.
I3. Add readability as its own axis next to chrF: sentence length and clause depth of the target tree, per author. The paper separates literalness from literariness, and the current normal-mode score does not.
I4. Mark concepts that are theologically marked in the meta-lexicon, so that the encoder does not silently normalise them; count how many of them change between standard and author.

For Mova

The paper gives a conceptual frame, not a method. Its strongest transferable point is that translation strategy is an author-level choice, which is what the delta in tools/translate models. The useful work is in tools/translate/measure.rs: an explicit divergence count (I1) and a readability axis (I3). The concrete test is the KJV/WEB/ASV set of verse pairs, where the meta-world must show that single-term deltas, not the strategy as a whole, carry the difference.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.6035/monti.2023.15.10

@inproceedings{bertos2023biblical,
  title = {{Biblical translation: do different strategies produce divergent texts?}},
  author = {Bertos, Elena Serrano and Cernuda, Miguel Ángel Vega},
  booktitle = {MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.6035/monti.2023.15.10},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6035/monti.2023.15.10}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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NOTA BIOGRÁFICA / BIONOTE E lena S errano B ertos es doctora en Traducción e Interpretación (mención internacional) y profesora del Departamento de Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad de Alicante desde 2011. Sus líneas de investigación son la traducción humanística —y, dentro de esta, la traducción teatral especialmente— y la terminología aplicada a la traducción, en torno a las cuales ha publicado varios trabajos, algunos de ellos en el marco de los grupos de investigación HISTRAD, MHISTRAD y TESTAF. Ha realizado diferentes estancias de investigación en la Universidad Carolina de Praga, en la Universidad de Viena, en el Colegio Internacional de Traductores de Straelen, Alemania, y en la Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera de Madrid. Compagina su actividad docente e investigadora con la traducción literaria. find
E lena S errano B ertos has a doctorate in Translation and Interpreting (international mention) and has been a professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Alicante since 2011. Her lines of research are humanistic translation —and within this, especially theatrical translation— and applied terminology to translation, on which she has published several papers, some of them within the framework of the research groups HISTRAD, MHISTRAD and TESTAF. She has carried out different research stays at the Charles University in Prague, at the University of Vienna, at the International Association of Translators in Straelen, Germany, and at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University in Madrid. She combines her teaching and research activity with literary translation. find

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