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Record W3009182742 · doi:10.1093/jts/flaa022

The Art of Bible Translation. By Robert Alter

2020· article· en· W3009182742 on OpenAlex
Peter J. Williams

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Theological Studies · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTranslation Studies and Practices
Canadian institutionsTyndale University College & Seminary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsStyle (visual arts)HebrewHebrew BibleLiteratureLinguisticsSyntaxPhilosophyArtBiblical studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This elegant book both explains Alter’s own translation of the Hebrew Bible and provides insight into numerous biblical passages. In the author’s words: ‘The practice of translation, as I have learned from experience, entails an endless series of compromises, some of them happy, some painful and not quite right because the translator has been unable to find an adequate English equivalent for what is happening—often brilliantly—in the original language’ (p. ix). Here is ‘an overview of the principal aspects of biblical style, a topic to which, somewhat surprisingly, no existing book has been devoted’ (p. xiv). Alter admires the 1611 KJV for its ‘inspired (not divinely inspired) literalism’ (p. 3), which meant that more of Hebrew style was represented in it than in contemporary translations, which typically have been ‘impelled by the misconception that modern readers cannot make sense of parataxis and that everything in the biblical text needs to be explained’ (p. 4). While he understands the compromises which translators must make, Alter seeks to put on the agenda for Bible translators five aspects of style that have tended to escape their attention. There are subtleties of the Hebrew and ‘… a translator needs first to see them and then to attempt to do something with them in translation, and the lamentable fact is that this has very rarely been the case’ (p. 121). Thus, after an opening chapter ‘The Eclipse of Bible Translation’, Alter takes us successively through chapters 2–6 on ‘Syntax’, ‘Word Choice’, ‘Sound Play and Word Play’, ‘Rhythm’, and ‘The Language of Dialogue’.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.940
Threshold uncertainty score0.426

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.147
GPT teacher head0.311
Teacher spread0.164 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it