It's all Greek verbs to me: handling Biblical Terms part-of-speech mismatch

Question

Although the New Testament is full of nouns that describe actions (Love, faith, salvation, and grace are some examples), the group of languages I work with very rarely express actions with nouns. All of these concepts, whether expressed by a Greek verb or noun in the NT, must be translated as verbs in the languages I work with.

This makes consistently rendering the multiple forms of a Greek word very difficult.

• When we are using the Biblical Terms tool, our renderings for the noun form will usually be the same as our rendering for the verb form, so we have to remember to put that rendering in both Biblical Terms in the list.
• When we are checking for consistency across a book, a series of books, or a whole project, we need to check both the Greek noun entry in the Biblical Terms list and also the Greek verb form in the Biblical Terms list. Sometimes there’s an adjective, too.
• Sometimes we struggle to come up with a rendering for a noun and later discover we already had a rendering for the verb form.
• Or we work to make a verb consistent throughout a book and later discover that the noun form also occurs in that book, but it was not in our Biblical Terms list.
• Or we filter our list for terms that occur in the current book. That sometimes means we have the Greek verb in our filtered list, but not the corresponding Greek noun.

So I am trying to think of ways to handle this part-of-speech mismatch between the Greek terms in the Biblical Terms list and the parts of speech they must map to in the target languages in a way that helps us translate all the words in a Greek word group consistently.

Make a note of it? I have tried making a note in the “Summary Note” section of the Biblical Terms rendering dialog that says something like, “our rendering for this term needs to be the same as the verb form.” I need to also make the same sort of note in the other Biblical Term. We have nothing in the user interface that will allow us to link to that other term, and you can only have one rendering dialog open at one time, so if we want to see what that rendering is, we have to go find that term, which may or may not be in our current filtered list.

Combine related words into one term? We could try combining whole groups of words into one entry in the list of Biblical Terms so we can track their renderings together. We would still have the old Biblical Terms as provided with Paratext if we ever want to see just the verb form occurrences. We have already created new Biblical Terms in our Biblical Terms list for our languages, so we know how to do edit the occurrences in a Biblical Term, but it would take a lot of time.

The advantages of doing this are obvious, but I wonder what the disadvantages might be.

If the NT contains word groups where a noun in a word group means something significantly different from the verb in the same word group, then this idea might not work well for that word group. I can’t think of an example of this.

I am only talking about the NT here, but the same issues would apply to OT Biblical Terms.

Surely we’re not the first team to struggle with this, so I’m hoping somebody has some good advice for us.

Answer 1

This may not help much, as it requires some knowledge of Greek. You can go to the Biblical Terms list, All Biblical Terms, switch the Find filter to Find Greek Term, and then type the first few letters of the Greek term. For example, typing apos into that box (αποσ in Greek) will filter various terms, some of which are related to the meaning ‘send’ (ἀποστέλλω) - namely, apostle, false apostle, etc. I then add the related terms to the Project Biblical Terms list (generally the vernacular language project.)

Using the same filter (Find Greek Term) in the Project Biblical Terms list, you can then bring the related terms in Greek together in one place, and compare how they are translated. For example, a filter for another word group (redemption) - that is, words with (λυτρ) in them, finds

	ἀπολύτρωσις	redemption; deliverance	
	λύτρον	ransom	
	λυτρόω		redeem	
	λύτρωσις	redemption
	λυτρωτής		redeemer	

I appreciate that this only works for those who have some knowledge of the Greek, so many mother tongue translators will be excluded. However, a translation advisor can at least assist the translators to see related Greek words and how they are translating them, gathered in one place.

Comments

Good idea. This will help, especially if I decide to create new Biblical Terms in which all the occurrences of all the words in the group are listed.

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This is definitely worth exploring for 4 reasons

1. it allows a way to collect information that is important to you or your team(s)
2. it should be exportable (probably lives in an xml file) if there are future updates that allow more specific types of relations
3. it is currently searchable
4. the file could possibly be shared between projects with a little massaging of the data (given the vernacular would be different).

(NB: the whole issue of semantic domains is a bit misleading because it usually implies English vs. source text domains and what we are probably concerned with is target language vs. source language domains. Nonetheless categories like “cultic terms, places, man made objects” can still be useful.)

If anyone was willing to start collecting data it could be tagged in the Notes field (and copied to related terms as appropriate) as following…

xxx, yyy, zzz
aaa, bbb, ccc
ggg, hhh, iii

Answer 2

I have been toying with the idea of having an extra field in the Biblical Term dialogue box where we can list related terms.
(My concern is slightly different because I wish to notify the translator of other terms that have the same referent. For example there are about 5 different terms for the tabernacle and a similar number for the ark of the covenant. In one project they probably need to make those expressions concordant.)
I was envisioning a field where you could enter info (perhaps link to related terms via pick list?) on related terms. If the terms were linked, then you could enter/change the info in on any of the linked terms and have it show up on all linked terms. I think that the linked field should be separate from the key term’s Notes field so that info related only to one term can be left in the Notes field.
I agree that that would still leave an enormous amount of work, but I cannot find any way around this. As helpful as the Biblical Terms Tool is, there are several very good but different ways of cataloging terms that will take many years to completely create, and some of these cataloging techniques cannot be sufficiently handled by PT as of yet. E.g.
a) your idea of related terms (somewhat of a BDB approach to Hebrew words),
b) overlapping and extensible semantic domains (somewhat of Louw-Nida approach),
c) and my idea of exact referents (somewhat of a Bible dictionary approach)

Answer 3

I think my questions are:

• How can we best help translators use the excellent tool we have, and
• Is there something inexpensive we can do to improve the tool
  significantly.

Your idea may be at least a partial answer to #2.

Do you think that your idea of exact referents is a subset of “related items”?

Comments

I agree there are probably two audiences of the tool which is very useful right now:

• the translator
• the consultant

I am pushing my translators to use the tool now in a pretty basic way.
They will understand it and use it appropriately over time.

For this team, I doubt they would use semantic domain information if that became more readily available simply because they categorize things differently. They certainly understand the typical English categories but those categories don’t always map very closely to their own.
The team probably would use exact referents which is something that comes up in face to face discussions.
(Hence my mention of it above.)

john_nystrom:

Do you think that your idea of exact referents is a subset of “related items”?

That’s a good question. In my mind they are related… but in a very specific way that could lead to a particular kind of translator response - concordance. I don’t expect most “related items” to be concordant, but exact referents would be much more likely to be concordant if that is what the team decides to do.