Translation
Թարգմանութիւն

Translation, in a broad sense of the word, is either the process of expressing words of one language in another language, or the end result of that process. The process of translation is performed by two different methods—translating and rendering.

Translate comes from the Latin translat-, “carried across” (past participle of transferre). When you translate, you take a word in someone else’s language, pick it up and carry it across the border back into your language. When it gets there, it’s still the same word, but now it’s in your language. Words are translated from the source language to the target language by way of loan words or calques (and some words are translated by way of both).

Loan Word. A foreign word is translated as a loan word by transferring it almost letter-by-letter (or phonetic sound-by sound) into the home language, with the same meaning. Translation by loan word is also referred to as borrowing or transliteration.

Calque. A foreign word is translated as a calque by taking the component parts of the word, and constructing a new word in the home-language using equivalent component parts.

Render comes from the Latin redare, “give back”. When you render, you take words (from one single word up to a multi-volume tome) in someone else’s language, put them into a pot, boil them down into another substance that has the essence of the original words, and then bring the new product back home into your language. By analogy, a whaler in the 19th century takes foreign whale blubber (a complex organic fat), and renders it in pots on his ship into domestic whale oil (still a complex organic fat, but in a different form), and then returns to his home port with the new product. Everyone’s rendering pot is different, because each person has different personal experiences (educational, cultural, etc.) that went into building and maintaining the pot. Everyone’s rendering process is different, because each person has different reasons for manufacturing the product, and different intended buyers of the product (for example, the reader of an academic journal is quite different than the reader of a children’s book). Because of this, no two renderings are exactly the same, and in some instances, they are significantly different. The many different Bible versions are different renderings of a source text.

Word Rendering Example

Two different English renderings of the same word, քաղցրութիւն (an abstract noun derived from the word քաղցր, “sweet”), in the same line:

Word Rendering Example

Three different words in the Bad­arak that are rendered “Armenians” in English:5

Example of Different Bible Renderings

1 χριστός (christos) is a calque translation of the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (mashiah), “messiah”, lit. “anointed one”.

2 From St. Gregory of Narek’s Prayer to the Holy Spirit, in Prayer 33 of his Book of Lamentation (Մատ­եան ողբեր­գութ­եան), which the Bishop inaudibly prays during the Preparation segment of the Badarak.

3 Thomas Samuelian, Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart. The Armenian Prayer Book of St. Gregory of Narek, Yerevan: Vem Press, 2001.

4 Daniel Findikyan, Ed., The Divine Liturgy of the Armenian Church, with Modern Armenian and English Translations, Transliteration, Musical Notation, Introduction and Notes, New York: St. Vartan Press, 1999.

5 Ibid.

6 The King James Version distinguishes the word “Lord” in three ways. In all capital letters, Lord represents the Tetragrammaton (four-letter) word יְהֹוָה (YHWH, expressed as Yahweh), the name of the Hebrew God. In all lower-case letters, lord represents אֲדוֹנִי (adonai), a title of respect. When the first letter is capitalized, Lord represents Adonai as the honorific used when addressing the Lord/God (Yahweh/Elohim). All three forms are used in Isa. 19:4 of the KJV: “And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts.” See also Note 8 below.

7 The KJV uses italics to distinguish words that do not have a directly-corresponding word in the source texts, but were added to the translation for clarity.

8 The New English Translation of the Septuagint only makes a distinction between Yahweh and Adonai when it could be shown that the Greek translator made a comparable distinction; otherwise, the Greek κύριος (kyrios) is typically represented by “lord”. Cf. Isa. 19:4 of the NETS: “and I will deliver Egypt into the hands of men, cruel lords, and cruel kings will lord it over them. This is what the Lord Sabaoth says.” See also Note 6 above.