Contributions to language

The contributions made by the Bible to Malayalam prose were not by any means confined to that language alone. In fact this is the case with almost all the languages that the Bible came into contact with. The word of God was brought down to the common person on the street and made part of her daily vocabulary. English, for example, would have been a much poorer language had it not been for the words and idioms from the Bible. There are many phrases that are part of daily usage which we use without realizing that they are actually from the Bible. As old as the hills, manna from heaven, love thy neighbor as thyself, see eye to eye etc are but very few examples. The Bible has seeped into western literature that it is difficult to extricate examples and list them. Imagery and metaphors are deeply indebted to the Bible. Classical works of literature that have drawn upon Biblical sources are too many to recount. Even titles owe themselves to the Bible – for example, Resurrection (Tolstoy), Absalom! Absalom! (Faulkner), etc. Adaptations of stories from the Old Testament are plenty. Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, tower of Babel etc are commonly used images.

The Bible added to the vocabulary of vernacular languages because the significant aspect about Bible translations was its emphasis on fidelity to the source text message. This resulted in sense for sense translation rather than the literal one. Eugene Nida who was primarily involved in Bible translation and was only secondarily a translation theorist, accordingly came up with the concept of dynamic equivalence where the emphasis is on communicating the spirit of the text rather than anything else. He says of dynamic equivalence: “In such a translation one is not so concerned with matching the receptor-language message with the source-language message, but with the dynamic relationship, that the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message” (129). In practice this meant that the translator had to substitute equivalents from the receptor culture to denote an alien concept. Nida quotes from J. B. Phillips’s translation of the New Testament to prove his point. “In Romans 16:16 he quite naturally translates “greet one another with a holy kiss” as “give one another a hearty handshake all around” (130). The translation has been modified to suit a contemporary milieu.

The Bible thus became the ordinary man’s scripture in the true sense of the word through scores of dedicated translators. They remained faithful to their source text, and made the target language richer through their indefatigable search for the right words to convey the divine message.


Assignments

1. Trace the history of Biblical translation in the west.
2. Make a list of Biblical words and phrases that has become part of your vernacular vocabulary. Are they different from their usage in English?
   
   

References

Nida, Eugene. “Bible Translation”. Routledge Encylopedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker. London: Routledge, 2000: 22 – 28

“Principles of Correspondence”. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000: 126 – 140

George, K. M. Western Influence on Malayalam Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1972.