Bible Review

Michael Bullock, “Enquête,” in Quality in Translation, ed. E. Cary and R.W. Jumpelt (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 149.

I have modernized the spelling. Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 47, notes that since the “political function” of early English translations was “to make the complete text of the Bible accessible, this led to a definite stance on priorities by the translator.”

In contrast, Zoltán Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956), p. vi, believes that “the work is no literary treasure trove; yet much of the ridicule heaped upon it seems undeserved.”

See Harvey Minkoff, “Some Stylistic Consequences of Aelfric’s Theory of Translation,” Studies in Philology, 73:1 (January 1976), pp. 29–41. E.F. Sutcliffe, “Jerome,” Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. II, p. 96, translates verborum ordo as “the precise character of the words.” But Jerome’s point remains the same: translating the Bible is distinct from translating anything else.

Epistle LVII, in Jerome: Lettres, ed. Jerome Labourt (Paris, 1953), vol. III, p. 59.

Lists of common words and phrases taken from the Bible used to be commonplace in histories of the English language. See, for example, Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905), sections 250–253 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, ninth ed. 1955), pp. 252–255.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose, “Translation Types and Conventions,” in Translation Spectrum, ed. Rose (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1981), p. 32: “In overt translation the receiving reader or listener knows that the text is a translation and recognizes that it is bound to the source culture … Covert translations, on the other hand, are almost accidentally in a language other than the original, for they are not bound to a specific culture.”

See Victor Paul Furnish, The Moral Teaching of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2nd edn., 1985), especially chs. 2 and 4.

Ars Amatoria, 2.681f., 725–728; 3.793f.