Bible Translations as a Case of Grapevine Communication

Abstract

Grapevine telephone or grapevine telegraph is a popular social game involving a specific way of communication by means of linguistic expressions.The game appears to be a model of communication in general and of translation, as a special case of communication, in particular. All communicative events involve transferring meanings as messages from some person(s) to some other persons directly or indirectly, i.e. via other persons, if necessary including translators, and with or without the help of various technological devices. Every communication event entails communication sequences (Krzeszowski, 2016). A simple communication sequence consists of seven stages: 1. sender’s conceptual, 2. sender’s neural, 3. articulatory (speaking) or graphic (writing), 4. acoustic (spoken text) or graphic (written text), 5. auditory (hearing) or visual (reading), 6. recipient’s-neural, 7. recipient’s-conceptual. Most communication events, both spoken and written, and all translations involve compound communication sequences. Various kinds of distortions are very likely to occur at the stages which separate particular speakers’ conceptual structures from particular hearers’ conceptual structures. Such distortions are mainly due to communication barriers (Krzeszowski, 1997/2013). Translators, like participants in the grapevine telegraph game, may contribute to increasing the number of distortions adversely affecting original messages. The grapevine telegraph effects and the related communication sequences are illustrated by translation series of selected fragments of the Bible (Psalm 78, Jesus Christ’s sermons) in the context of the way in which, according to the faithful, the Bible originated.

Keywords

• grapevine communication
• bible
• translation