Biblical translation in Chinese and Greek; verbal aspect in theory and practice.

9789004178656

Biblical translation in Chinese and Greek; verbal aspect in theory and practice.

Foley, Toshikazu S.

BRILL

2009

449 pages

$216.00

Hardcover

Linguistic biblical studies; v.1

BS315

A researcher with the Bible Society in Taiwan, Foley is currently working on Bible study notes for the Chinese Union Version, and so intimately familiar with difficulties that attend translating scripture across cultural and linguistic borders. Uppermost in his mind here is that the source version of the Bible that is translated into Chinese has traditionally been English, more specifically the King James Version. English and the Greek it translates both use verb endings, he points out, but Chinese does not, so the information they carry must be transferred to some other structure. After a brief history of the Bible in Chinese, he looks at verbal aspects in Mandarin Chinese and New Testament Greek; translating the Greek perfective, imperfective, and stative aspects in the indicative mood into Mandarin; non-indicative moods and conditional clauses; and examples from John's passion narrative and 1 Corinthians.

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