Erwin and his family lived in Russia for several years. He got involved in linguistic research, which culminated in a PhD degree (Nijmegen). He currently is a translation consultant as well as a linguistics consultant for projects in Russia and Central Asia.
A Voice Is Heard – The Intermediate Language as a Filter of Grammatical Voice
Abstract
The draft of Romans 10:13 in one language in the Caucasus said that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord ‘will go-from-under’ (that is: will escape). This is an intransitive rendering of a passive voice verb in the Greek (‘will be saved’). The reason for the mistake is that the draft was made on the basis of a Russian translation (the ‘Synodal’), that uses a verb in the middle voice. Russian as intermediate language in this translation project apparently filters the original voice system in a way that is not necessarily understood correctly by translators who use Russian as a second language.
This paper reports a case study that reviews the effect of voice filtering on parts of the published translation into one Caucasian language: all ‘hofal’ forms in the Hebrew Old Testament, and all Greek indicative passive forms used in Matthew and Romans. While the Synodal only uses the middle voice in a minority of occurrences, a significant number of these were translated as intransitives initially (6 to 33 percent), and some of these mistakes have gone unnoticed altogether. This paper zooms in on one of the reasons for the filtering and the subsequent mistakes: the nature of Caucasian languages, which are morphologically ergative and have no passive voice, but they do have a causative one.
The results exemplify the voice filtering problem for projects that use an intermediate language that might skew the voice system of the original Greek or Hebrew.