Awe before the Holy: In Search of a Normative Perspective for the Ethics of Bible Translation

According to John Frame (The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 2008), robust ethical decisions involve, at the least, three different perspectives: normative, situational, and personal/existential, like three legs of the ethical stool. Translators, consultants, and review committees involved in Bible translation, are often faced with the ethical dilemma of how much their own theology influences their translation and how much the text influences their own theology. Given the past century's tectonic shifts in epistemology, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most difficult of these ethical perspectives to identify and to incorporate is the normative perspective. In her recent article about quality in translation, Alice Reed (2024) wrestles with this ethical dilemma. From the normative perspective, Reed appeals to Nord's idea of "loyalty" and also to Tymoczko's "self-reflexivity" as pathways to providing some deontological structure for the translators. While both of these options are promising for providing an external and normative perspective for the translator's consideration, both "loyalty" and "self-reflexivity" require intimate knowledge of the source texts, otherwise they meld into community-based (situational) or subjective (existential) perspectives. So I propose that translators should be trained in Biblical theology, in order to begin to see both the theological themes that run through the entire Bible and the individual concerns of each book. In the past, following the principles of dynamic-equivalence, translators have inadvertently rendered unrecoverable some key Biblical theological terms, effectively erasing inter-textual links that could help orient the audience. It is my contention that translators should feel a certain awe before the holy as they grapple with their own worldview and that of Scripture in order to communicate with a contemporary audience. This struggle is precisely what is necessary to ensure a normative perspective in the ethical decisions that translators unavoidably face.