Lifting the fog surrounding the Christian God : translation of The Ology by Marty Machowski

• Main Author: Yeo, Hui Lin
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Language
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148668
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Many Chinese have long held the Christian God at arm’s length, believing that such a “Western faith” has little relevance to Asian culture and beliefs. The understanding of the Christian God is further clouded by the common perception that Theology is an intellectually rigorous discipline undertaken by college academics, and therefore beyond the reach of children. Through the English-Chinese translation of The Ology, a children’s book on systematic theology, this project aims to lift the fog surrounding the Christian God particularly for young Chinese children. In the process of translating the Source Text (ST), two key questions were asked: (1) what are the culturally-specific items (CSIs) found in the ST? (2) how may these CSIs be best translated to yield a Target Text (TT) which not only resonates culturally with its young target readers, but is also faithful to truth statements and narratives found in the Christian Bible? The theoretical framework of this project leveraged on Eugene Nida’s classification for CSI categories, coupled with Peter Newmark’s translation strategies, which were developed closely with Nida’s CSI taxonomy. In addition, the Chinese New Version (CNV) Bible was a primary source of reference for standard and established translated terms used within Chinese churches. There were a total of 50 unique CSIs found in the ST, with “Religious CSIs” (62%) unsurprisingly forming the majority, followed by “Linguistic CSIs” (22%), “Social CSIs” (10%), and finally “Ecological CSIs” (6%). As hypothesised, most of the translation strategies employed to deal with these CSIs tended towards “domesticating”, or adapting the text for its young target readers, but only to the maximal extent allowed for a TT to remain faithful to theological truths and established translated terms. A survey could be carried out in future to objectively determine the reception of the final TT among its target audience of young mainland Chinese readers.