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Quote of the Day: The Lord’s Prayer
“Give us this day our daily seal.” — Hans Egede’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer for Greenland aboriginal people.
Translating the Bible is difficult. Frankly, translating any work can be difficult. Different languages put more freight on certain words than others. It can be difficult to capture all of the metaphorical meanings of a given word or phrase when rendering it into another language. This becomes truer as the languages are further apart, coming from different language families. Moreso, when the language one is translating into, has no word for the word in the original language.
Hans Egede was a Danish Lutheran minister who took on the challenge of a mission to Greenland. As he started translating Christian concepts, one that stymied him was the simple concept of bread. The Inuit natives of Greenland had no word for bread. They grew no grains because the land was too cold. They lived off the sea. In translating The Lord’s Prayer, Egede had to use a concept they were familiar with, and so in the Inuit translation, seal meat replaced bread.
Published in General
It’s the greatest invention since sliced seal.
I don’t think I agree with that translation, both from a theological and translator wordsmith point of views. Obviously from a theological point of view there is an issue. From a translator point of view, if there is no word in a given language to translate to, then you borrow the word and explain it. Obviously the Inuit natives today have seen bread.
Susan, you borrow the word from the other language. We have so many borrowed words. Tepee for instance is a borrowed word from Native Americans because English didn’t have a word for it.
Sure, but he was translating in the Eighteenth Century, and we’re in the Twenty-First.
Raca!