Resurrecting the Gospel in a Native Environment: An Evaluation of Some Translation Models

Abstract

Resurrecting the gospel from the original languages into a new and native environment is not a mere and easy task; it involves making the word of God culturally relevant, original, and appreciable to the indigenes. For God's message to be culturally relevant to the local indigenes such as the Ghanaians and Africans, it demands using an appropriate translation model that will help achieve this purpose. After evaluating intralingual and interlingual model, interpretive theory, skopos theory, formal and dynamic equivalence, and communicative and semantic translation model, it was identified that all the translation models are means to resurrecting the gospel into a new and native environment such as the Ghanaian and African communities, despite some recognised challenges; no translation model is perfect. However, communicative and semantic translation model is the most preferable to resurrect the gospel in a native environment, say the Ghanaian and African environment; communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original text, whereas semantic translation attempts to render, as close as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original text. This method also allows translators to produce the same effect produced by the original text on the receptor language readers, and not an equivalent one which could not be on all levels”the word, sentence, and discourse”at the same time. Bible interpreters and translators have widely accepted Nida's formal and dynamic equivalence in Bible translation, and must now consider engaging with Newmark's communicative and semantic models in translation to help them produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original text.