addressing God

Translators of different languages have found different ways with what kind of formality God is addressed.

Like many languages (but unlike Greek or Hebrew or modern English), Tuvan uses a formal vs. informal 2nd person pronoun (a familiar vs. a respectful “you”). Unlike other languages that have this feature, however, the translators of the Tuvan Bible have attempted to be very consistent in using the different forms of address in every case a 2nd person pronoun has to be used in the translation of the biblical text.

As Voinov shows in Pronominal Theology in Translating the Gospels (in: The Bible Translator 2002, p. 210ff. ), the choice to use either of the pronouns many times involved theological judgment. While the formal pronoun can signal personal distance or a social/power distance between the speaker and addressee, the informal pronoun can indicate familiarity or social/power equality between speaker and addressee.

In these verses, in which humans address God, the informal, familiar pronoun is used that communicates closeness.

Voinov notes that “in the Tuvan Bible, God is only addressed with the informal pronoun. No exceptions. An interesting thing about this is that I’ve heard new Tuvan believers praying with the formal form to God until they are corrected by other Christians who tell them that God is close to us so we should address him with the informal pronoun. As a result, the informal pronoun is the only one that is used in praying to God among the Tuvan church.”

In Gbaya, “a superior, whether father, uncle, or older brother, mother, aunt, or older sister, president, governor, or chief, is never addressed in the singular unless the speaker intends a deliberate insult. When addressing the superior face to face, the second person plural pronoun ɛ́nɛ́ or ‘you (pl.)’ is used, similar to the French usage of vous.

Accordingly, the translators of the current version of the Gbaya Bible chose to use the plural ɛ́nɛ́ to address God. There are a few exceptions. In Psalms 86:8, 97:9, and 138:1, God is addressed alongside other “gods,” and here the third person pronoun o is used to avoid confusion about who is being addressed. In several New Testament passages (Matthew 21:23, 26:68, 27:40, Mark 11:28, Luke 20:2, 23:37, as well as in Jesus’ interaction with Pilate and Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well) the less courteous form for Jesus is used to indicate ignorance of his position or mocking.” (Source Philip Noss)

In the most recent Manchu translation of 1835 (a revision of an earlier edition from 1822), God is never addressed with a pronoun but with “father” (ama /ᠠᠮᠠ) instead. Chengcheng Liu (in this post on the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology blog ) explains: “In Manchu tradition, as in Chinese etiquette, second-person pronouns could be considered disrespectful when speaking to superiors or spiritual beings. Manchu Shamanist prayers avoided si [‘you’] and sini [‘your’] for this very reason. To use them for God would be, in Lipovzoff’s [one of the two translators] words, ‘the most uncouth and indecent way to speak to the Almighty — as if He were a servant or slave.’ There was also a grammatical problem. In Manchu, si and sini could refer to both singular and plural subjects. For a faith that insisted on the singularity of God, this was potentially confusing. By contrast, repeating ama removed any ambiguity.”

In Dutch, Afrikaans, Gronings, and Western Frisian translations, God is always addressed with the formal pronoun.

See also formal pronoun: disciples addressing Jesus, female second person singular pronoun in Psalms.

Translation commentary on Baruch 2:25

And behold in some languages may be translated as “Look.” Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version prefer “And now.”

They have been cast out to the heat of day and the frost of night: Good News Translation says in the previous verse that the bones were “scattered,” which anticipates this clause. The Greek verb translated cast out suggests in this context being thrown out and exposed. The same expression is used of King Jehoiakim in Jer 36.30 (43.30 in Greek). There Good News Translation translates “Your corpse will be thrown out where it will be exposed to the sun during the day and to the frost at night.” Here at this passage in Baruch, Good News Translation has isolated the two aspects of meaning and separated them. “Scattered” describes the bones that have been thrown out of the tombs, and it is moved forward into verse 24 because it follows naturally after “taken from their tombs.” In verse 25 “lie exposed” translates the other aspect of the meaning of the verb. We should note that while scattering would be the net effect of throwing bones out of tombs, it should not be understood to mean that they were transported to some other place, or scattered as seed would be. A better rendering here would probably be “they have been thrown on the ground….” or, as Contemporary English Version translates, “[they] lie scattered all over….”

For to the heat of day and the frost of night Contemporary English Version has “scorched by the sun during the day and covered with frost at night.” In cultures where frost is unknown, we may say “frozen rain.” Most translators, however, in this modern age are familiar with older refrigerators and the frozen substance that builds up in their freezer units. Frost is similar to that.

They perished in great misery, by famine and sword and pestilence: The problem here is to make clear who we are talking about. Surely most readers would assume that the writer means the kings and ancestors whose burial places were desecrated. But we are really talking here about carrying out the threatened punishment on Judah, the desecration of the graves (verse 24), the destruction of the temple (verse 26), and here, the miserable deaths of the people. Moore supplies “The people” as the subject of this sentence, and he is surely correct in doing so; other translators should follow his lead. The group of three terms famine and sword and pestilence occurs several times in Jeremiah (for example, 14.12; 24.10; 32.36; 38.2). Famine means “starvation” (Contemporary English Version), the sword stands for death through “war” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version), and pestilence refers to highly contagious diseases such as the bubonic plague. If we take “the people” as the subject of this final sentence, we may alternatively translate it as “The people died horrible deaths from starvation, war, and disease.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Shorter Books of the Deuterocanon. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2006. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.