Modern Missionary and Vernacular Translation
The worldwide vernacular translation movement and the translation theory it produced, with its contested history.
The modern era put the Bible into more languages than all previous centuries combined. Missionary translators — often the first to write a language down — made translation an instrument of evangelism, literacy, and, at times, of colonial power; the history is contested and must be told whole.
The same movement produced translation theory itself: formal and dynamic equivalence, and the continuing argument over what faithfulness to a text requires when its world and the reader's world differ wholly.
References
- STEP Bible — Tyndale House Free / open access
Other Translation Traditions
- The Septuagint (LXX) — The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria — the Old Testament of the early church and of Orthodoxy.
- The Targums — The Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that accompanied synagogue reading and preserve ancient interpretation.
- The Peshitta — The Syriac standard Bible, the first complete Bible translation of the Christian era, still read across the Syriac churches.
- The Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, the text of Western theology for a millennium and the Catholic Church's declared rule of faith at Trent.
- Vetus Latina (Old Latin) — The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
- The Ancient Church Translations: Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic — The early versions of the daughter churches, which preserved texts lost elsewhere and made the Bible a literature in five more tongues.
- Arabic Bible Translations — A thousand years of Arabic versions, differing by community and confession, down to the Van Dyck Bible of 1865.