On Explication

This is the third part of a series on translation responding to a recent post by Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? It probably would be helpful to read the other two posts first: On Meaning and On Audience, but here are some major takeaways from those two posts:

• Words usually do not have single meanings, but rather a range of meaning that must be determined based on context.
• The range of meaning for a word in one language rarely corresponds to the same range of meaning for a single word in another language.
• Even within one language, words can mean different things to different audiences.
• So, in order to make sure you are communicating the right meaning, you need to consider the audience (their language, culture, knowledge of the text, etc.).

With this background in mind, I would like to discuss something that Aaron mentions in his post, which is what translators call “explication.”

Explicit and Implicit Information

In order to understand explication you have to first understand that in human communication, we always say less than we mean. Consider the statement I made to a missionary colleague, “Stacey is at home, but I am in the village.” By “Stacey” I am referring to Stacey Ann Hare (my wife), and by “at home” I mean “at the house we are currently renting in Yaoundé, Cameroon.” We would say that the name “Stacey” is explicit information, because there is an explicit expression of this information in the sentence. The other information (her full name, relationship to me, the Yaounde location of the home, etc.) is implicit information. I would not say any of this implicit information to my missionary colleague, because they would already know who Stacey was, and where we currently consider home.

However, if I was sending a message to an American church that doesn’t know us, I would say, “My wife, Stacey, is currently at the house we are renting in the capital of Cameroon, while I am in the village that we minister in, which is called Dimako.” The process of revealing the implicit information to communicate the meaning to a new audience is called “explication.” In the purple sentence above, some implicit information from the first sentence is now explicit. No meaning was added, just the necessary information for the new audience.

In my previous post, On Audience, I used an example of the French word pratiquer which in English could be simply translated as “to practice.” If a Kwakum person was to use the French word pratiquer, they almost certainly would be referring to practicing magic, something that is not true for the English verb “to practice.” With this in mind, consider how I would translate this sentence from Cameroonian French into American English:

• A cette epoch, ma famille a pratiqué.
• During this time, my family practiced magic.

In this example, the explicit information is the single verb “to practice” and the implicit information is the word “magic.” At first glance, it looks like I added information, but I didn’t. If I just said in English “my family practiced,” it would be an incomplete thought, and you would almost certainly misunderstand. I did not add information, I simply “explicated” the information that was already clear to the original audience. And I did so because it was necessary. Without the “explication” the wrong meaning would be communicated, or no meaning at all.

I think that one of the main areas of my disagreement with Aaron is that he refers to “explicit meaning.” I think this is a misunderstanding of the concept of explicit information. Explicit information is those words that are overtly stated in a text. Implicit information is not overtly stated in an utterance but is nevertheless communicated in its meaning. The words themselves are the “explicit information,” but (in translation terminology) there is no such thing as “explicit meaning.” The “meaning” of a text is the composite of the explicit and implicit information. And, as I described in the post Translation is Meaning-Based, the act of translation is translating the meaning of a text, not the words. To speak of “explicit meaning” gives the idea that we translate word-for-word, which is not the case.

Explication in Bible Translation

Let me give you an example of explication in Bible translation. The Kwakum people are unfamiliar with many of the names of places in the Bible. And so, the first time a text mentions “Jerusalem” we will translate it in Kwakum as “the city of Jerusalem.” The original audience understood that Jerusalem was a city (evidenced by Jerusalem being referred to as a city in many places in the Bible). So, when the original audience heard the single word “Jerusalem,” they understood the meaning: “the city of Jerusalem.” In translating it that way, we are not adding information or meaning, but merely explicating the “implicit” information that the original audience would have already understood, but the target audience does not.

You might think that such explication is not necessary, as many English translations do not do this with proper nouns. However, let me ask you: What is Judea? A city? A region? A kingdom? How about Gilgal? Hebron? Moab? Are we benefited by not knowing what these places are? I don’t believe so.

Explicate as Much as Necessary and Helpful

Aaron in his post says that when translating, “as little implicit information should be included as possible.” I honestly do not understand this principle. Rather I say, explicate as much as is necessary and helpful.

For instance, when we translate the story of Zacchaeus, we will have to account for the fact that the Kwakum audience does not know what a sycamore is. In Luke 19:4, there is only a single compound word when referring to what Zacchaeus climbed: sycamore (it could also be called a fig-mulberry). That is the explicit information. For the Kwakum, the word “sycamore” would be meaningless. It could be a flower, or a type of building, a waterfall, or a mountain. So, it would make sense to explicate something. However, it would not make sense to translate,

“So running ahead, he climbed a sycamore (platanus occidentalis) which is a large, stately shade tree that can grow up to 120 feet tall with a massive trunk, broad crown, and large, crooked branches, to see Jesus, since He was about to pass that way.”

To the original hearers, all of the above information would have been implicit in the word “sycamore.” They had seen sycamores, they knew what they were and what they looked like, and had probably climbed them. But such a long sentence describing the tree would be neither necessary nor helpful. It is not necessary because one does not need to know the Latin name of the tree to understand what Zacchaeus was doing. It is not helpful because all of that information distracts from the story.

But, I think it is likely that we will say something like, “Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree” in Luke 19:4. The explication of “tree” helps readers that don’t know what a sycamore is to understand at least part of what the original audience understood: a sycamore is a tree. As far as I can tell all English translations explicate here.

This principle “as much as is necessary and helpful” is highly audience-dependant. If my target audience is English-speaking seminary professors, it would be silly to to say “the city of Jerusalem.” Explicating “the city of” is not “helpful and necessary” for that audience. However, there are many times, even for such an audience, that explication is “necessary and helpful.” For instance:

• Hebrew and Greek often omit the “to be” verb in sentences. In English we almost never omit it. So when we translate Psalm 1:1 – “Blessed is the man…” that “is” is an explication.
• Often times we explicate the names of individuals when the biblical language has no subject, or just a pronoun. So, the ESV translates 1 Chronicles 15:1 – “David built houses for himself” where the name “David” does not occur in the Hebrew text.
• Often times we explicate other nouns when there is only a pronoun in the original. So, the ESV translates Jeremiah 33:2 – “Thus says the Lord who made the earth...” where the original has a pronoun instead of “the earth.”
• And just in some random places, the translators of the ESV found it helpful to explicate. For instance, in Esther 1:6 we read in the ESV of “a mosaic pavement of porphyry.” The Hebrew has only two words, which could be translated as “porphyry pavement.” However, the translators of the ESV thought it was helpful to explicate that it was a type of mosaic pavement. (Porphyry is a costly stone, by the way. They might could have explicated that as well.)

Honestly, the question is not, “Do we explicate?” The question is, “How much do we explicate?” My answer, again, is: as much as is necessary and helpful. And again, the only way to know how much explication is necessary and helpful is by examining the audience.

Limitations to Explication

Now, I promote this type of explication with a couple caveats. You should not explicate something that is: 1) not clearly true, or 2) not clearly known by the mind of the original audience. Knowing what was in the mind of the original audience can be hard, and takes a lot of study. However, there is much implicit information that can be known, and explicated if it is necessary and helpful. Take all the examples above from the ESV. Often, even when there is a pronoun, we know who/what is being referred to. We can also learn through study that Jerusalem was a city, Bethlehem a town, and Judea was a region. It is not adding anything to the meaning of the text to explicate in these cases.

On the other hand, there is still a lot that we don’t know about the meaning of the biblical texts. For instance, the book of Ezra refers to a “river that runs to Ahava…” (Ezra 8:15). We don’t know what Ahava is, exactly. In some verses it seems like it is another river, but in this verse it seems like it is a place. Some have speculated that it is both. However, we shouldn’t translate, “a river that runs to a city called Ahava” because we don’t know if it was a city. That is not clearly true. The original audience knew what Ahava was, but sadly, we don’t. We cannot explicate that which we do not know.

Ultimately, I believe that these limitations are why, even though I disagree on how Aaron presents explication, we often would translate in similar ways. Compare Genesis 4:4a, in the ESV and in Aaron’s example of the Solomon Island Pijin translation:

• “and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions…” (ESV)
• “But Abel brought a firstborn lamb from among his sheep and killed it, and he brought all its good meat that had fat. He gave it to Yahweh as his offering.” (back translated from the Solomon Island Pijin translation)

For now, I want to focus on the “and killed it” portion of the second translation. Aaron argues that this is inaccurate, and I totally agree. The problem, though, is not that this was explication, but that we don’t know exactly what he did with the offering. It is likely that he killed it, for it would be difficult to bring its fat portions without killing it. However, it could have been Adam that killed it. The problem is not explication here, but that the translators explicated something that is not clearly true. Now, if you were to translate it like this: “and Abel also brought an offering of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions…” I believe that this is helpful explication. It is clear that this is an offering based on the original text, even though the original text does not include the word for “offering” in this part of the verse. Aaron actually explicates the word “offering” here in one of his sentences in the blog post as well:

“In the case of Genesis 4:4a, the Hebrew source states that Abel brought an offering and makes no mention of killing or butchering meat.” (emphasis mine)

This explication is reasonable not only for a blog post, but for a Bible translation.

As a friend, I would ask Aaron to rethink this statement from his post: “Accuracy entails preserving the explicit meaning of the source text and not implicit information.” My next post is going to cover accuracy, so for this post I want to just focus on the part that we should “preserve the explicit meaning…and not implicit information.” Again, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as explicit “meaning.” Rather, the combined explicit and implicit information communicate a specific meaning to a specific audience. Our goal as translators should be to communicate that composite meaning as best we can to our target audience, using explication as much as is necessary and helpful.

This is why an analysis of audience is essential. The amount you explicate can only be determined after examining your audience. This is not a one-time process. As we are translating for the Kwakum, we are constantly asking ourselves, “What would our target audience understand?” If they would understand nothing, or the wrong thing, we have to rethink our translation. This is not just a question of naturalness, but of whether or not our translation is communicating the same meaning as the original. This must be considered in a conversation about accuracy, which I will discuss in my next post.

Image above taken from: https://www.art.com/products/p28133352421-sa-i8595413/abel-offering-sacrifical-lamb.htm