Abstract

NAUDE, JA. The role of the 1920 trial translation in the development of Afrikaans as a Bible language. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2025, vol.65, n.1, pp.402-426. ISSN 2224-7912.  https://doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2025/v65n1a17.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate the role of the 1920 trial translation of the Gospel of John, the Prophet Hosea and the Prophet Jonah in the emergence of Afrikaans as a Bible language by means of a description and analysis of selected translation proposals with respect to a constellation offeatures including divine forms of address and epitheta (considering the Afrikaner epistemological tradition of Neo-Calvinism prevalent during the 1920s), morphophonological and morphosyntactic change and lexical alternatives, as well as the translation choices thereof in the subsequent translations. The trial translation was reported as lost in 1934, but was discovered on 16 March 2023 in a file at the Dutch Reformed Church Archives at Stellenbosch. After the Bible translations of the Bible Translation Movement (1872-1911), there was much controversy about Afrikaans as a Bible language. There was no fixed form of Afrikaans as a written language when the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Free State commissioned a translation of the Bible in Afrikaans in 1916. The translators decided at their first meeting in the beginning of 1917 to undertake a trial translation of the Gospel of John, the Prophet Hosea and the Prophet Jonah, which could then serve as a guide for translating the rest of the Bible. The negative criticism during 1918 and 1919 of the language use of the proofs of the 1920 trial translation after its circulation from the last quarter of 1917 enhanced the publication of the next trial translation titled Die Vier Evangelie en die Psalme (The Four Gospels and the Psalms) in 1922, which also received negative critique. The Afrikaans translation project was then reconceptualised considering the previous two failures. The third trial translation titled Die Vier Evangelies en die Boek van die Psalms (The Four Gospels and the Book of Psalms) published in 1929 was well received and served as a guide for the successful translation of the first complete Bible in 1933. With this translation Afrikaans as a Bible language was established, which was only possible after Afrikaans had achieved recognition as an official language in 1925. In the 1920 trial translation the alternative formulations, which were placed between brackets, are only found in the translations of three of the six translators and only in the following passages: Jonah 1-4, Hosea 2, John 10-13,15 and 20:4. These cases reveal that there were translation problems which compelled the translators to exercise translation choices. Therefore, these alternative formulations are first described and analysed. The emerging role of Afrikaans as a Bible language during 1912-1923 is demonstrated by comparing the issues in the verses described above with their renderings in the Dutch Statenvertaling, the Bible translations of the Bible Translation Movement (1872-1911) and the 1922 trial translation. I also follow the trajectory of these issues through 1923-1967 with the 1929 trial translation and the appearance of the first complete Bible translation in Afrikaans in 1933, as well as its revision in 1953. In the emergence of Afrikaans as a Bible language, the problem of the translators was to free themselves from the bonds of the Dutch language and writing tradition, especially the words and expressions of the State Translation, so that Afrikaans could be used according to its own idiom. The analysis is in line with the view of Marais (2014; 2019; 2023) namely, that the conceptualisation of translation has expanded to encompass translation as a complex, unpredictable process (rather than solely a product). Complex systems are adaptive, dynamic (constantly changing) and emergent (having the tendency to self-organise to reach a subsequent higher state), following particular trajectories because of the influence of attractors. Translation is also a meaning-making process driven by translation agents and attracted by a purpose or skopos which must satisfy the needs of the audience, and which is informed, amongst others, by the translation brief (Nord, 2023:180).

Keywords : translation studies; Kobus Marais; Christiane Nord; Bible translation; trial translation; trajectory; language development; written language; colloquial speech; contemporary speech; form of address; pronoun; proper noun; relative pronoun; attributive adjective; variant; church language; Son of Man; Afrikaans; Dutch.

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