Hearing God in Our Languages: Strategies for Translating the English/Greek/Hebrew Bible into Tshivenda

Mokhele Madise; Dakalo Takalani

doi:10.25159/2412-4265/19576

Authors

Mokhele Madise University of South Africa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1583-860X
Dakalo Takalani University of South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-4265/19576

Keywords:

semantic shift, Tshivenda, missionaries, translations, Christianity

Abstract

This article explores the term-creation process as one of the strategies that significantly contributed to the expansion and development of the Tshivenda language. The term-creation process involves forming and incorporating new words into the language. Translators apply this strategy due to the lack of equivalent terms and the existence of a cultural gap between the source and target languages. When confronted with the challenge of a lack of equivalence in the target language, early translators of the Tshivenda Bible (1936) resorted to using the term-creation strategy (that is, semantic shift, borrowing, derivation, and compounding) to resolve this problem. It was largely through Bible translations that some basic words acquired new canonical meanings. Subsequently, new lexical units entered the Tshivenda lexicon. Given this exposition, the article examines Tshivenda terms that attained new meanings through the Bible translation. The article hinges on the qualitative research method as it enabled the researchers to analyse data from the Tshivenda Bible (1936) effectively.

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