We who speak English as our mother language must recognise that we have a privileged position in the world. Because English is the world’s international language, there are many versions of it and this may cause misunderstanding. It also means that a person learning English as a second language may find himself (or should I say themselves) in a minefield.
I think of a Dutch drainage engineer who would say: ‘If I would go down the road, I would reach the pillar-box.’ Perfectly logical, What’s the problem? The problem is that no native English speaker would say that. He would say: ‘If I were to go down the road, I would reach the pillar-box’. Or he might say ‘If I went down the road, I would reach the pillar-box.’ Or he might even say: ‘Had I gone down the road, I would have reached the pillar-box.’
Sequence of tenses and conditional clauses pose difficulties for a learner. So do adverbs. It is understandable that a novice might form the view that all adverbs end in -ly. So he might say ‘He was going fastly.’ Perfectly reasonable but no native English speaker would say that. And that same speaker would never say: ‘A big great balloon came into the garden.’ These idioms are something we learn at our mother’s knee. It’s not a matter of logic. It’s instinct.
Again, the native English speaker may refer to his missus. If the novice finds this puzzling, he may discover that the word is a corruption of ‘mistress’. But if he replaces the word by ‘mistress’ he may find himself in greater difficulties than he was in before.
Words are not like numbers. They don’t have one clear meaning. They have connotations and overtones. Like the word ‘gay’, they change their meaning as the days go by.
And all this has implications for translations of the Bible. It is well said: ‘All translation is betrayal’, or as the French put it more neatly, ‘Traduire, c’est trahir.’ Consider Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14. If ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ are simply interchangeable, it might be as well to replace the word ‘tongue’ in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14 by the word ‘language’. But ‘speaking in languages’ is not quite the same as ‘speaking in tongues’. It happens that the word ‘tongue’ has been around longer in the English language. It was part of an Anglo-Saxon’s vocabulary. ‘Tongue’ came later – from the Latin lingua. The older word was part of street English and had familiar overtones. When it comes to translation – of the Bible as much as anything else – these things matter.
SOUTH CAVE L.E.P.
The village of South Cave, Yorkshire has a mention in the Domesday Book. Its name probably derives from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘fast-flowing’. A nearby stream rather than a dell (think of St David’s cathedral, Wales, in a hollow) gave rise to the unusual name. All Saints’ church has teamed up with the Methodists to form a local ecumenical partnership. Mike Proctor, the Vicar, ministers alongside Methodist minister Ann Rigby-Jones. A lively magazine is strongly supported by advertisers and edited by Beatrice Maitland. The church supports Tim Curtis, a Bible translator in Paraguay.
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