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Translating metaphors into Afrikaans in a source language-oriented translation of the Hebrew Bible

Summary

The paper asks how metaphors should be handled in the New Bible in Afrikaans (NBA). The NBA is a source language-oriented translation meant for reading aloud in church and also for catechism, Bible study and private reading. The authors take Gutt's idea of a "direct or stimulus-based translation" as the project's skopos, set inside Nord's functionalist model of translation briefs. Their hypothesis is that a basic grasp of how metaphors work cognitively, and how they are rooted in culture, gives a defensible basis for interpreting and rendering them. They first list six common strategies for Bible metaphors: keep, keep and explain, turn into a simile, substitute, paraphrase, or omit. They argue that only keeping the metaphor fits this kind of translation. Using the ascriptive metaphor "God is a sun" (Ps 84:11) as a test case, they draw on conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending. This shows why paraphrases and similes lose meaning potential and bring in modern cultural models. The result is a strategy proposal that matters for any translation trying to keep source imagery while staying intelligible.

Key points

  • Afrikaans Bible history:
    • 1933 word-for-word version, close to the Dutch Statenvertaling, revised in 1953.
    • 1983 dynamic-equivalent version.
    • In the 1990s about one third of Afrikaans Bibles distributed by the BSSA were still 1933/53 editions.
  • A BSSA conference in August 2001 led to an assignment for four types of translation (Versions 1–4). In 2003, a Version 2 and a Version 3 were produced.
  • The six catalogued strategies are illustrated with concrete verses:
    • Ps 18:3, shield (metaphor kept).
    • Ps 23:5, oil on the head (kept and explained).
    • Ps 84:11, sun (simile).
    • Luke 13:32, Herod as fox, rendered as snake in Swati (substitution).
    • Ps 7:11, shield (paraphrase).
  • A footnote compares seven modern renderings of Ps 84:11, including the 1983 Afrikaans Bible, the NET Bible and the Good News Bible. Each narrows "sun" to something like light, protector or king.
  • The theoretical tools used are:
    • Lakoff and Johnson's view that metaphors shape everyday thought.
    • Conceptual blending of at least two input domains.
    • Idealized Cognitive Models.
    • Cultural models, such as the sun as a life-giving symbol of order for the psalmist versus a ball of fire for modern readers.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A metaphor blends at least two conceptual domains, so swapping it for a literal phrase or simile discards part of its meaning potential rather than restating it.
  • I2. The same image activates different cultural models for different readers (ancient sun as order and life versus modern sun as a light source), and translators unknowingly import their own.
  • I3. Lining up several existing renderings of one verse exposes how each one narrows the source, which makes a cheap diagnostic of what information is lost.
  • I4. The authors derive the handling of figures from an explicit brief (skopos) rather than from case-by-case taste, which makes every choice defensible.
  • I5. The paper asks the reader to infer the intended sense of a metaphor in context, treating its meanings as weak implicatures, rather than spelling them out.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Figurative predications like "X is a sun" could be stored as links between two frames rather than flattened to one literal role, so later reasoning keeps the open inferences.
  • I2 (world): Knowledge-graph entries for concepts could carry context- or era-tagged cultural associations, so the world model does not silently assume a modern reading.
  • I3 (learn): When several witness parsers or LLM teachers disagree on a figurative sentence, comparing their outputs side by side can flag spots where each loses meaning, instead of just voting.
  • I4 (back): Generation and translation through the meta-world could take an explicit brief (literal-faithful vs. reader-friendly) that decides whether metaphors are kept, explained or paraphrased, logged for explainability.
  • I5 (frames): The implicature module could treat metaphor senses as ranked weak implicatures with confidence, rather than a single forced literal paraphrase.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages · Machine translation

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages Idioms & multiword expressions

 Institutions

🎓Stellenbosch UniversityStellenbosch · South Africa13 works · 24,025 citations

Cite

Cite as Van der Merwe, Christo H. J. and Elisabet Hendriks. 2006. Translating metaphors into Afrikaans in a source language-oriented translation of the Hebrew Bible. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus 33.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5842/33-0-24

@inproceedings{j2006translating,
  title = {{Translating metaphors into Afrikaans in a source language-oriented translation of the Hebrew Bible}},
  author = {Van {der Merwe, Christo H. J.} and Elisabet Hendriks},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus 33},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.5842/33-0-24},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5842/33-0-24}
}

References

39 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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