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Journal of Translation 3(2)
Four Bible translation types and some criteria to distinguish them
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the classification of Bible translation types. This paper proposes four types instead of the traditional two: literal and idiomatic or dynamic equivalent. The four types are Type 1) close (or literal) resemblance, Type 2) open resemblance, Type 3) close (or limited) interpretative, and Type 4) open interpretative. There are several continua of criteria: the degree of resemblance to the original semantic content, the degree of explicitness, and the type of adjustments needed to unpack the meaning. Eight criteria of adjustments are proposed to distinguish these four types: 1) order of clauses and phrases, 2) sentence length, 3) reference disambiguation and tracking, 4) concordance of lexical items, 5) key terms and unknown terms, 6) figurative usage and idioms, 7) transition marking, and 8) information structure.
|Four Bible translation types and some criteria to distinguish them|
|Keywords||grammatical issues in translation; lexical issues in translation; information structure; Translation principles; Translation theory; Functional equivalence; Relevance Theory|