Re-Translating the Luvale Bible with a New Perspective: An Analytical Study

Abstract

Mukanda wa Kalunga, the Bible in Luvale and referred to as LUE70 in here, is a work whose translation process developed from as early as 1902. From this early work, other sections of the Scriptures continued to be added from that time up to its completion and publication. However, LUE70 contains some lexical items that are confusing because they do not sound Luvale and are inconsistent with the perceived theme of the Bible. The reason for it is that the earlier translators had very little native knowledge of the language. Through the years, some missionaries have gained more knowledge of the Luvale language since the Bible’s publication, and at the same time, some Luvale speaking natives have also gained enough knowledge of the English language to work together to re-translating the earlier work. The targeted texts are those that lack intelligibility between meanings of some Source-Language (SL) and Receptor-Language words, phrases, expressions and sentences. Therefore, to mitigate the inconsistencies, there is the use of the Frames methods which translate meaning by evenly distributing the ideational, interpersonal, or interactional and textual meanings to give a more natural receptor-language rendering to the texts with closeness to the original. The following identified inconsistencies in LUE70 are taken from the Old Testament texts: Pentateuch (Genesis), the Poetry section (Psalms), and the New Testament texts: the Gospels (Matthew), Acts, the Epistles (1 Corinthians 15) and Revelation, and analysed by comparison with the SL text meanings according to context.
Keywords: Mukanda wa Kalunga, Intuition, Christians, Church, Epideictic