FIDELITY EROSION: BACK-TRANSLATION ANALYSIS OF SOME SELECTED VERSES OF THE BIBLE NSO VERSION

Abstract

This study investigates the washing away of meanings during translation process and the cause of this erosion. The research makes use of back translation technique to show how culture and some linguistic tendencies such as ambiguity, limited vocabulary lexical mismatch, word order or structural mismatch affected the translation of English Bible (King James Version) to the Igbo Bible (Bible Nso version translated by Thomas J Dennis). To achieve this, the research adopts the theory of sense translation also known as descriptive theory. Some verses of the Bible Nso were randomly selected and back translated to contemporary English for analysis through content analysis method. This research reveals that there are some loss of meanings or erosion of meanings during translation process of the Igbo Bible, of which when back translated to English does not produce the same effect as the original source, whereas, the ultimate goal of a translation is to give same sense effect to the target language as the source language. Random sampling method was used to select some verses in the Bible cutting across the old testaments and the New Testament. The findings of this work shows that cultural factors as well as linguistic factors such as ambiguity, limited vocabulary or lexical mismatch, word order or structural mismatch, figurative expressions are the major cause of the washing away of meanings.