Configuring the Language to Convert the People:

The Translation of Hebrew Flora and Fauna Terminology in North Sámi and West Greenlandic fin de siècle Bibles

“…Third, differences in the structural makeup of the North Sámi and Greenlandic languages themselves contributed to the different translation strategies. As Petterson (2012, 143) has pointed out, the polysynthetic nature of the Greenlandic language and its innate proclivity for complex descriptive lexical items is such that it readily lends itself to the creation of highly descriptive neologisms. North Sámi, on the other hand, has a very different structure and a long history of borrowing from Scandinavian languages.…”

“…Fourth, Kleinschmidt was following an established precedent of descriptive neologisms in the partial Greenlandic Bible translations dating back to the first New Testament version, produced by Poul Egede in 1766 (see Petterson 2012, 143). The North Sámi translation lacked such a tradition.…”

“…Similarly, palmi “palm” would have been known to the target audience if only for its appearance in the compound palmit-sapaataat “Palm Sunday,” which had been a feature of Greenlandic life since the arrival of Christianity. Moreover, the words for “grape” and “fig” had been translated using Danish loanwords in earlier Greenlandic versions of the New Testament (Petterson 2012, 143).…”

(Con)figuring gender in Bible translation: Cultural, translational and gender critical intersections

“…Also, her aversion to subjectivity and indeterminism is supported by her insistence on control in translation, which is effected, theoretically at least, through her dominating skopos-theory. 9 In short, Nord's work interacts with cultural concerns probably more 4.Recent work on colonialism, missionaries and Bible translation includes for example, Boer (2008); Dube (2001), Petterson (2012), Stine (1992). Cf.…”