Bibliographic record
Abstract
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’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.019 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".