Beyond word alignment

#translation #linguistics

“It is impossible to study patterned data without some theory, however primitive. The advantage of a robust and popular theory is that it is well tried against previous evidence and offers a quick route to sophisticated observation and insight. The main disadvantage is that, by prioritizing some patterns, it obscures others. I believe that linguists should consciously strive to reduce this effect until the situation stabilizes.” (Sinclair, “Trust the Text,” 10)

This quote outlines the situation with biblical linguistics: it’s easier and faster to get to sophisticated observation, but you wind up obscuring the things your theory didn’t account for.

When it comes to alignment, we’ve been so busy focusing on one particular unit, the word, that we haven’t paused to think through what is it that we are not focusing on, and what we are missing out on by adopting this focus.

The major downside to word alignment is that a word is not a translation unit; it is a linguistic structure, and structure is precisely the thing that you leave behind when you translate a text.