Re: [lojban] Translating the Bible

Metaphors.

There are lot of metaphors. The answer might be the following:

if we are to make Lojban the primary meta-language for machine translation on this planet then we must have two styles:

1. Lojban as a meta-language. The translation must be super-bulky, every metaphor must be marked with {pe'a} BUT it must be clearly shown that this {pe'a} was added by translators, not by the Bible itself ({to'i pe'a toi}???).

2. There must be a script that would cut away certain constructs that are not so necessary for reading by humans.

What is more #2. must allow of generating different styles of the output Lojban:

2.1 Chinese style would cut away tenses but retain event contours.

2.2 Russian style would retain both

For most languages {to'i pe'a toi} would be converted to simple {pe'a} or deleted completely.

Religion

I suggest paying more attention to Jewish tradition.

The name of the Lord wouldn't be translated in 1. (la'oi + tetragrammaton) but would be translated according to each tradition for each translation.

2014-03-28 1:08 GMT+04:00 Sebastian <seb@lojban.se>:

Ok, nice.
So I think the first thing to decide is what perspective we would like to have when we're interpreting/translating the Bible.

Every kind of church have their own opinion about how to interpret different things, and they translate in accordance with their own beliefs.
The Bible is also probably the most quoted work in the history. What's the impact if the lojbanic community later is translating works where the Bible is quoted? Which version does the work in that case refer to? How have Biblical concepts developed historically? How does people now and in the past understand these concepts? I'm just saying that if we're constructing new lujvos and fu'ivlas for important concepts in the Bible, that's quite normative, is representing just a certain point of view and might influence later lojbanic translations.

Should we even call our translation the Bible? Shouldn't we recognize it's origin and pay more attention to the Jewish Tradition, and consider the Tanakh (Old Testament) as a work separated from the New Testament?

And how do we reason when tertau, single brivla or whole phrases/sentences are meant to be interpreted metaphorically? Do we have to mark every metaphorical construction with {pe'a}? Or what about idiomatic expressions/"dead metaphors"?

I think our translation should be close to how the work was interpreted at the time it was written. And I think we should translate expressions like "the ones who urinate on the wall" as {ro le prenu poi pincyvi'i re'o [?] lo bitmu} or similar rather than {ro nanmu} even if this might offend some Christians.

Ok, I just think we should think about things like this before starting the translation process. What's the purpose. To be a literal translation of an important historical literal work and/or to be a lojbanic version of the canonical text of some religion or something else?

Just think about it.
/Sebastian

Skickat från min iPhone

27 mar 2014 kl. 17:46 skrev Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>:

On Thursday, March 27, 2014 16:58:02 Sebastian wrote:
Hi,
translating the Bible would be awesome. I don't have much time though, but I

might be able to help a little here and there, commenting stuff. What
degree of ambitions are we talking about here? It took a group of

professional linguistics, biblical experts and representatives of various
religious organizations around 20 years to complete a translation of the

Bible into Swedish (Bible 2000-version). So what's the ambition and
competence in this project. Does anyone have at least basic knowledge of

Biblical Hebrew and of the Biblical Contexts? I'm interested and have
studied some Religion at the university here in Sweden, but I don't have

knowledge about Biblical Hebrew. /seb

If you could translate sections and review sections others have translated,
that would be great. Don't expect more than first draft quality until a lot of
the Bible has been translated. If you can translate a passage from a few
translations, that would be better than no translation at all.

I know New Testament Greek fairly well but sometimes run into a word I'm not
sure how to translate. I know a little bit of Hebrew, but Mark Shoulson is
better at it (not to mention Welsh and Klingon). I also have the NT in
Aramaic; some words are familiar from Hebrew, others aren't. Half of Daniel is
in Aramaic. The language changed from Daniel to the NT, but it's recognizably
the same language, and even in Daniel there are some borrowings from Greek
(sumponya, psanterin).

Pierre
--
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa

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