PhD thesis,

Politeness and addressee honorifics in Bible translation

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(2010)

Abstract

This study deals with the difficulties of translating the Bible into languages with honorifics—a problem that Bible translators inevitably face in some languages. The difficulty lies in the fact that honorific languages utilize a special class of words or grammatical morphemes, whose functions are to indicate social-deixis among the interlocutors in the communicative events. As there is no socially neutral form in honorific languages, the speaker must always choose between deferential or non-deferential forms and will thereby always convey information about the speaker-hearer relationship, the context of communication and the current cultural expectations. Thus, a translation into inadequate honorific forms not only leads to a misunderstanding of the implicit meaning of the source text, but also distorts the style of the translated texts. Source: Author

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