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Ethics and Church Interpreting
Bryan Harmelink
Bible Translation and Church Interpreting: Challenges and Synergies
Ethics and Translation
Ethics and Interpretation
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
 The need for ethical principles
 The complexity of ethics in Translation
 Guiding principles
 Ethics of Bible translation strategies
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
 Definition: concern for the other, loving
our neighbor
 If we could imagine a universe of one,
there might not be a need for ethics…
As soon as there is more than one,
the need for ethics arises…
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Possession of or perceived possession of
power is inherent to the human condition
and the use or exercise of power by one
person, clan, community, or nation over
another calls for ethical principles to
guide these relationships.
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
“What if Judges had been written by a
Philistine?”
Susan Ackerman, 2000 in Biblical Interpretation
Ethics of Biblical Interpretation
Daniel Patte, 2004
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
“Critical interpretation is a praxis that is
intrinsically ethical, because from its
starting point to its concluding point it is
structured by concerns for others (and the
Other)” (Patte, 2)
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
the male and European perspectives,
approaches, methods, and interpretations
are taken to be normative and universal
and therefore posited as the only
legitimate ones. (Patte, 25)
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Bible translation is intrinsically ethical
because it is also motivated by “concerns
for others (and the Other).” It is precisely
because translation, like all human
activities, involves others that its ethical
nature must be considered.
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to
Foucault
Hindess, 1996
 Capacity to act
 Capacity and right to act
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
“virtues are acts of moral choice”
“not Capacities, for we are not called
good or bad merely because we are able
to feel, nor are we praised or blamed.”
Aristotle, Ethics, 55
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Only in a universe of one can power be
conceived of as the mere capacity to act
 If we could imagine a universe of one,
there might not be a need for ethics…
The Complexity of Ethics in Translation
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Meta-ethics
The field which investigates where our ethical
principles come from, and what they mean
It’s no surprise that questions of ethics are
emerging in the midst of
postcolonialism…
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
But where do ethical principles come from?
Scripture
but the Bible is not a ready-made
catalogue of ethical principles…
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
Just as doing theology from Scripture
is a hermeneutical process,
deriving principles of ethics from Scripture
is a hermeneutical process…
and this must involve cultural
considerations
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
Why does it matter where you
“do ethics” from?
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
The system of ethics constructed from the
margins is an ethics that proclaims a God who
exists in the midst of the people's suffering, and
that seeks to be faithful to the praxis of the
gospel message in spite of existing social
structures that thwart the faith community's
struggle for justice.
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins--Second Edition (Kindle
Locations 1065-1067).
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
…justice-based relationships from which love
can flow
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins--Second Edition (Kindle
Location 1165).
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
…ethics done on the margins is and must
remain a contextual ethics that seeks to see the
liberating work of God through the eyes of
those made poor, those victimized, and those
made to suffer because they belong to the
“wrong” gender, race, orientation, or economic
class.
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins--Second Edition (Kindle
Locations 1219-1221).
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
Using the eyes of the marginalized, or observing
from below, becomes the first step in arriving at
any ethical response; it informs how God is
understood, how Scripture is read, and how
society is constructed.
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins--Second Edition (Kindle
Locations 1187-1189).
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
Failure to incorporate the voices of the voiceless
makes ethics useless for the vast majority of the
world's people, who struggle each day for the
basic necessities of life— food, clothing, shelter.
Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins--Second Edition (Kindle Locations
1268-1270)
Turns of Translation Studies
During the 1990s the relationship between colonialism, language
and translation became a popular topic for research. A milestone
in this field is a book by another Indian-born scholar, Tejaswini
Niranjana. In Siting Translation. History, Post-structuralism, and the
Colonial Context (1992) she shows how both language and
translation were used to enforce and perpetuate unequal relations
of power, prejudice and domination. This applies particularly
where Indian texts were translated into English for the benefit
of the British colonizers. A striking example is the work of Sir
William Jones (1746–1794), the orientalist and jurist who
arrived in India in 1783 and sought to use translation “to
domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of
European learning” (1992: 12). Turns, 94
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Translated by Edward Fitzgerald
These verses, which we anglophones have come
to intone as though they were scripture, are not
those of Omar Khayyam (meaning Omar the
tentmaker in Farsi), but those of a less
celebrated Victorian poet, Edward FitzGerald.
Our affection for the rhyme scheme, the
aliteration, the meter, the very image the words evoke, is not for
Omar, but for his tranlator, Edward FitzGerald. It was not Omar
who wrote, "oh, but the long, long while the world shall last," but
FitzGerald. FitzGerald translated this Twelfth Century poetry in
the very early years of the Nineteenth Century, seven hundred
years after Omar. It is FitzGerald to whom we should be grateful.
Fitzgerald considered Persians inferior
and felt he should ‘take liberties’ in the
translation in order to ‘improve’ on the
original.
Munday, Jeremy (2013-02-28). Introducing Translation
Studies: Theories and Applications (Kindle Locations 47604761). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
The foreignizing method of
translating, a strategy Venuti also
terms ‘resistancy’ (1995: 305-6), is a
non-fluent or estranging translation
style designed to make visible the
presence of the translator by
highlighting the foreign identity of
the ST and protecting it from the
ideological dominance of the target
culture. 147
As far as the language is concerned, the
minoritizing or foreignizing method of Venuti’s
translation comes through in the deliberate
inclusion of foreignizing elements, such as
modern American slang, in a bid to make the
translator ‘visible’ and to make the readers
aware they are reading a translation of a work
from a foreign culture. 147
Ethical Dimensions of Translation
 Ethics  translator
 Ethics  translation
 Ethics  text
 Ethics  audience