The Bible in Afrikaans: A direct translation – A new type of church Bible

What it is about

The article is a project account. It describes how the Bible Society of South Africa commissioned a source-oriented (direct) Afrikaans Bible for churches that asked for a close rendering of the original. The academic model rests on Nord's functional model of translation, complemented by Gutt's relevance-based approach. The working method separates the roles: exegetes and source-language experts prepare a richly annotated word-for-word translation, and professional translators, who often do not know the source language, prepare the direct translation from it. Book teams were made up of two exegetes, a source-language expert, a translator, an Afrikaans linguist and a literary scholar. Deadlines slipped, and the team was reorganised: the second exegete's role was suspended, since the source-language expert could moderate the first exegete's work, and the exegetical coordinators were dropped. The article reports no quantitative evaluation.

Ideas

• I1. The annotated word-for-word layer is the translator's meta-world under another name: each meta token keeps its source words, its concept, its tag and its head. A check of a few verses by an expert, token by token, gives a disagreement count per class that can be set against the reader's residual.
• I2. Stage the review: a source-side check (the reader's alignment with the Hebrew, or the parse of the source) before the target encoder, measured in bits per layer, as in the translator's exact mode.
• I3. Keep the split of roles in the design: the reader decides the meaning (concepts and frames), the standard encoder decides the words. The residual per layer already measures this split, so the separation can be tested instead of assumed.

For Mova

The paper has no numbers to copy, only a division of labour that matches the layers of the translator. Its problems are open problems 1 and 3: the reader's attachment noise and the encoder's need to write trees. Summary only.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/hts.v68i1.1204

@article{merwe2012bible,
  title = {{The Bible in Afrikaans: A direct translation – A new type of church Bible}},
  author = {Merwe, Christo H.J. van der},
  journal = {HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 68},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.4102/hts.v68i1.1204},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v68i1.1204}
}

References

44 references, 1 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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