Translation Techniques and Interpretative Phenomena in the Greek Version of the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Figurative Use of the Noun צֵל 'Shadow'

What it is about

The paper follows one Hebrew noun, tsel ("shadow"), through the Old Greek (Septuagint) translation. In Hebrew, the word has a literal sense (shade cast by a body), some time senses (the shadow of evening) and figurative senses: shelter, and the transience of human life. The Greek translators render the literal senses with skia ("shadow") in about 30 of 52 occurrences, but avoid skia when the figure is protection, and choose skepe ("cover, protection") instead. The author checks three lines of evidence: the Hebrew context (for instance the Hebrew abstract "gloom" translated as "shadow of death", which pulls skia toward a negative sense); the use of skia in Greek literature from Homer on, where the shelter sense stays marginal; and the non-literary papyri of the Ptolemaic age, where skepe is common in the sense of protection. The conclusion is that the translators judged skia too poetic and too tied to darkness to carry a metaphor of protection. The evidence is hand-collected tables, not statistics.

Ideas

• I1. Per-sense equivalent tables: for each source concept, count which target words the reader and the encoder use, split by sense class (literal, time, figurative). The encoder should pick by the concept's sense class, not only by its neighbours. The count is a table over profile.rs contexts.
• I2. Do not merge concepts across senses in the lexicon. A merge of a literal "shadow" with a figurative "protection" would be the kind of noise open problem 2 is about. Test by keeping the two senses apart and checking the residual in bits.
• I3. Register check against a non-Bible reference: for each chosen target word, count how often it occurs in non-Biblical English, the analogue of the papyri test. Words that occur only in the Bible are candidates for a style delta.
• I4. Print a Table-1 style report from measure.rs: per author, the distribution of concepts over sense classes, run twice for identical output.

For Mova

The method is the one Mova already uses, applied to one lexeme: collect the occurrences, tabulate them, and let the context decide. The relevant code is tools/translate/profile.rs (the most specific context that has been seen often enough), meta.rs (the lexicon, where the sense split would live) and measure.rs (the report). Open problem 8 (style deltas per register) is the target: the papyri argument is a register measure, and Mova's version is a count over non-Bible English. The Greek and Hebrew data are not for Mova to use directly.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-16522

@inproceedings{vergari2015translation,
  title = {{Translation Techniques and Interpretative Phenomena in the Greek Version of the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Figurative Use of the Noun צֵל 'Shadow'}},
  author = {Vergari, Romina},
  booktitle = {Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali 1},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-16522},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-16522}
}

References

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