by Jacob A. Loewen
Every message basically has two dimensions: form and meaning. Form involves the given language, a specific language level or style, the particular grammatical patterns, specific words, the gestures, etc. Meaning relates to the content.
Every message basically has two dimensions: form and meaning. Form involves the given language, a specific language level or style, the particular grammatical patterns, specific words, the gestures, etc. Meaning relates to the content.
A woman who had given birth to twins relayed a telegram to her husband. She phoned the message to Western Union. In order to make sure that he had taken down the message correctly, the operator asked, "Would you repeat that, madam?" "No," she replied emphatically, "not if I can help it." The operator asked for the form of the message; he was not concerned about meaning. But the woman, overwhelmed by the arrival of her twins, was responding to the meaning of her message in her answer to him.
This two-dimensional aspect of the message has serious implications for translation and language learning. What do we translate, the form or the meaning? We would like to translate both, but this is not always possible. Older Bible translations often reproduced only the form. As a result, the reader was denied the meaning. Two examples: "children of the bridechamber." (Mk. 2:19, KJV). and "gird up the loins of your minds" (I Pet. 1:13, KJV). What then is the language that communicates?
It is the language in which the receptor habitually experiences and expresses his inner psychic experience. For most people this is the language of their birth and upbringing, but not for all. I was raised to speak German until I was about seven years old, but as a result of migration from Europe to Canada, English became the language of my heart. German still conveys some highly emotive qualities for me, but it is no longer the language of my inner experience. My intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth has been experienced through English.
The language of education may or may not be the language of the heart. For many Africans, English or French has been the language of education, but they have retained the language of their birth and upbringing as the language of their heart. In fact, education is often a very "dry" experience for such people, because the language of education lacks some important functions.
Language has three primary functions: (1) the informative, (2) the emotive, and (3) the imperative. We can readily see that the language of education functions well in capacity (1) – it transmits information, but it seldom has emotive value for the student. He does not express his inner feelings by means of it. Likewise, the language of education is often very limited in its imperative function. It does little to change a man’s moral and religious values. Christians are very much concerned with the imperative function. We want to move men to obey the gospel, and for this we obviously need the language of the heart.
The Bible gives us two excellent examples of the use of the language of the heart for effective communication. When the Lord stopped Saul, the persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus, he spoke to him in the Hebrew language, the language Paul had learned at his mother’s knee (Acts 26:14). Paul had experienced a sizeable portion of his education in Greek, which was the intellectual language of the day. But God did not only want to transmit information, he wanted to move Paul to action, and so he used the language of his heart.
Likewise, on the day of Pentecost, in order to convert the various Jewish peoples who had been raised in languages other than Hebrew, the Holy Spirit used the languages of their birth (Acts 2:6, 8, 1 I ). As a result some 3,000 individuals accepted the Christian faith on that day (Acts 2:41).
The emotive and imperative functions of language are usually carried by (1) the appropriate thought and value patterns, (2) the special discourse styles, and (3) special collocations of words, etc. All of them are important, but we will limit our discussion here to some aspects of the third.
Each language has certain taboo words which, because they are too holy (like Hebrew JHWH), or too vulgar (like certain four-letter words for bodily functions in English), are avoided and replaced by euphemisms. We have these for example in the King James Bible: "Said went in to cover his feet," 1 Sam. 24:3 (relieve himself); "Adam knew Eve his wife," Gen. 4:1 (sexual intercourse); "I am to be gathered unto my people," Gen. 49:29 (die); "I have sinned against heaven," Lk. 15:18 (against God). Inappropriate usage in this area will readily cause the receptor to reject the message.
On the other hand, the proper use of figurative language (metonyms, synecdoches, similes, metaphors, idioms, etc.) will greatly heighten the impact of a message. The impact is often heightened by the oblique reference of figurative language. The indirectness of figurative extensions of meaning grows out of the fact that this type of meaning is not based on components of the referential meaning, but on certain arbitrarily (i.e., unique to each culture) assigned supplementary components.
For example, fox in Indo-European languages in its figurative usage means "sly, cunning," but this quality is assigned to very different animals in other cultures, to coyote in North American plains, to raven on the Northwest coast, to jackal in certain African languages. The biblical, "Go, ye, and tell that fox" (Lk. 13:32) is probably consistently misunderstood because the biblical ground of comparison is not recognized. The Jewish figurative meaning was based not on the component of cunning, but destructiveness. Zink’s new translation in German correctly translates the passage, "Go tell that fox, that destroyer . . . "
It is not enough to use a specific language, buts a specific variety of that language. All languages tend to exhibit differences of style. Most languages exhibit differences of level according to the person’s socio-educational position in his society. Both of these dimensions can create serious communications problems when disregarded or misused.
These styles or functional varieties of language are intimately linked with the social setting in which the language is normally used. William L. Wonderly in his book Bible Translation for Popular Use lists four such styles or varieties: ( I ) formal, (2) regular, (3) casual, and (4) intimate. There is an analogy between these language varieties and certain styles of dress: ( I ) formal – black tie and tails: (2) regular – business suit; (3) casual – sport shirt and slacks; (4) intimate – slippers and dressing gown.
He points out that many missionaries who have learned a second language well, and who feel that they have good rapport with the people for whom this is a language of the heart, often attempt to use the intimate variety of speech with their friends.
Missionaries having learned Spanish would begin to use "tu," the familiar pronoun, and the corresponding verbs in addressing their friends. But Wonderly explains that almost every time their attempts at intimacy become very jarring experiences for the receptors, because the missionaries do not control the appropriate vocabulary forms and collocational patterns that go with such more intimate varieties of language. They are using proper grammatical forms, but because their speech lacks the rest of the intimate or casual signals, the receptors sense a strong contradicting paramessage.
Most societies, including folk and tribal societies, exhibit at least some differentiation in language according to the socio-educational level to which the individuals belong. Because people function at different levels they also require the appropriate language level if their communication is to be effective. It is for this reason that the Bible Society is producing at least four different levels of Bible translations in the major world languages.
Because of the differing socio-educational levels to which people belong, their experience – especially in matters of verbal symbolism differs. As a result we have a difference in channel capacity. This does not mean to suggest that some people always understand more than other people. The same person has differing channel capacity in different areas of information. For example, when dealing with a scholarly work on history, the professor of history at the university will most likely have a wider channel than the mechanic who fixes his car at the local garage. However, when it comes to matters of the inner workings of the motor of the professor’s car, the mechanic will probably have a decidedly wider channel capacity than the history professor. For this reason the preprogramming of the message for the capacity of the receptor channel is so vital.
The adjustment of the language difficulty to the receptor’s capacity can also be viewed in terms of an horizon. Each receptor or group of receptors is capable of managing a certain level of difficulty which constitutes his/their horizon of capacity. If the message flow is too high, consistently beyond the capacity of the individual, he will become discouraged and give up trying to understand it. If the message is consistently beneath his horizon of difficulty, he experiences no challenge and he will reject the message.
No message will be absolutely adjusted to the horizon. It will rise above and fall below as more difficult and simpler parts of the discourse are fitted together. For example, when new literates in Latin America bought Reina-Valera Bibles and began to read them, they soon got discouraged and gave up because the language was beyond their horizon. However, when the Spanish Popular Version reached the market, many of the same people said, "Aha, now God is beginning to speak a language we can understand."
Two of the most important tools for adjusting message difficulty are kernel sentences and components of meaning. Kernel sentences are the simplest grammatical statement of a truth. The readability of a text wild be increased with the visibility of kernels. Note this example (1 Pet. 1:3b-4):
"By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfailing, kept in heaven for you" (RSV).
"Because of his great mercy, he gave us new life by raising Jesus Christ from the dead. This fills us with a living hope, and so we look forward to possess the rich blessings that God keeps for his people. He keeps them for you in heaven, where ti-hey cannot decay or spoil or fade away" (TEV).
The advantages of kernel sentences are (1): Kernels reduce the "size of the lumps" of information. The expression "our beloved ruler" contains two kernels which are intertwined "he rules us" and "we love him" – but they can be separated and then strung out in serial fashion with a coordinating conjunction, as in "he rules us but we love him." (2) Kernel sentences state the relationship between words more unambiguously. The surface structure of the expressions "children of disobedience" and "children of wrath" (Eph. 2:2-3) look very similar, but the relationship between the words in the two obviously are not the same.
In the first place, we have a figurative usage of the word "children" which really refers to "people." In "children of disobedience" the people are the ones who are disobeying. Restated as a kernel sentence it reads simply: "people disobey." But "children of wrath" does not deal with people who are angry, but rather with an implicit actor, God, who is angry. Here the kernel is: "God is angry with people."
(3) The third benefit of kernels was already illustrated in the last expression. Kernel sentences require that all essential information, which often is implicit in the surface structure, be made explicit. Note Mark 1:4, with implicit actors given in parenthesis:
"John did . . . preach the (John) baptism of (people) repentance for the (God) remission of (people) sins." The concept of components of meaning helps us to analyze the seemingly unitary meaning of a word into its component parts. Once the components have been identified, they can be stated serially – one after the other, rather than stacked on top of each other in the unit word. One of the best examples of components in a string is the Today’s English Version translation of "justification" as "having been put right with God." "Being justified by faith" (Rom. 5: 1, KJV) now occurs as "we have been put right with God through faith." Other devices to achieve a language that really communicates include the use of redundancy, easier ordering of clauses, potential periods in longer clause sequences, and so on.
The benefit of a Bible translation in a form of language that really communicates is two-fold: (1) many people who have hitherto not understood the Scriptures now do understand them; (2) the very appearance of common language translations in major world languages – English, German, French, Spanish, and so on – has had a most beneficial impact on the Scriptures now being made available in hundreds of tribal and national languages.
These common language translations have provided meaningful models for translations into tribal languages. Even more importantly, they have inspired nationals around the world to prepare equally meaningful translations in their mother tongues for their own people.
Today, in many parts of the world, just as on the day of Pentecost described in Acts 2:8, 1 1, people are saying: "How is it, then, that all of us hear them speaking in our own native language . . . of the great things that God has done!" (TEV).
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