Religious texts                                                                      

Besides old literary texts, others that usually have modern language versions are religious texts. In India we have many versions of the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, both as adaptations for children as well as for adults. Here it must be stressed that there might be interlingual translations as well. For example, Ramayana of Valmiki was originally in Sanskrit, Tulsidas translated / retold it in Hindi, and there could be a modern Hindi language version of Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas. What we have here is a complex of inter and intralingual translations.

The Bible also has a similar trajectory. Assumed to be originally written in Hebrew, the Bible also underwent numerous translations into Greek and Latin and then into English. The King James Bible or the Authorized Version has primacy in English. But the language is antiquated and many people might find it difficult to follow. So today there is the Good News Bible, which is the modern English version of the Authorized Version. This sort of modernization is going on in every language.

Douglas Robinson terms this ‘intertemporal translation’ which he defines as “translation between two forms of the same language separated by the passing of time” (“Intertemporal Translation”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 114). He admits that modernization of an older text is often called revision, but the problem is of deciding where to draw the line between ancient and modern versions of the same language. In other words, when do we decide that a language is archaic enough to merit translation into a more accessible form? This would determine whether we should call it a revision or a translation – if the language is archaic enough like Chaucer’s Middle English, then it can be called translation whereas a contemporary edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress would be revision. 

Robinson points out that most interlingual translations are also intertemporal. The main example is that of the Bible. A modern English translation of the Greek or Hebrew Bible is an example of both forms. Here the translator is faced with another vexing problem – should she translate into archaic English to maintain the antiquated nature of the text? Some readers might not like the modern idiom for the words of God, for “a Bible translation . . . that sounds too much like a translation breaks the illusion, reminds the reader that what s/he is hearing is not the voice of the original author but of the translator, which in turn underscores the fact that the reader is reading ‘just’ a translation, not the Word of God, not the immortal words of a classic author” (115). To modernize or not is a dilemma that all intertemporal translators will have to face – provided, of course that they are translating from one language to another.