pride

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The Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin that is translated as “pride” in English is translated as

  • “continually boasting” (Amganad Ifugao)
  • “lifting oneself up” (Tzeltal)
  • “answering haughtily” (Yucateco) (source for this and above: Bratcher / Nida)
  • “unbent neck” (like llamas) (Kaqchikel) (source: Nida 1952, p. 151)
  • “praising oneself, saying: I am better” (Shipibo-Conibo) (source: Nida 1964, p. 237).
  • “bigness of head” (existing idiom: girman kai) in the Hausa Common Language Bible it is idiomatically translated as or (Source: Andy Warren-Rothlin)
  • “trying to make yourself the leader” in Mairasi (source: Enggavoter 2004)
  • “make oneself important” (sick upspeeln) in Low German (source: translation by Johannes Jessen, publ. 1933, republ. 2006)
  • “a haughty liver” in Yakan (source: Yakan Back Translation)
  • “lift head” in Upper Guinea Crioulo (source: Nicoleti 2012, p. 78)

See also proud / arrogant.

Translation commentary on Baruch 4:34

This verse presents God as speaking in the first person. As suggested above in the comments on verse 30, the task will be much easier if we shift this into the third person. Good News Translation does not do this, but is forced to shift the third person in verse 35 into first person. But this creates an abrupt transition to the first person at verse 34. If Good News Translation intends verse 3l to begin God’s speaking, it does not indicate it by quotation marks.

And I will take away her pride in her great population: Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version have reversed the lines of this verse, but in view of the fact that the first line is closely connected with the last line of the previous verse, it may be wiser not to do this. Notice that there is a problem with the tense of “took pride” in Good News Translation. From the point of view of the writer, Babylon still exists, has not fallen, and still is taking pride in her population. This is the only verse in Baruch in which this problem appears. All other references to events are clearly either past or future. The Greek text expresses the idea of pride with a noun (see Revised Standard Version), but if this noun is translated as a verb, a past tense may distort the picture.

Good News Translation shifts focus ever so slightly by having God take away Babylon’s population rather than her pride in that population. This is easily acceptable, but there are other ways of rendering this verse and keeping the original focus; for example:

• She is proud of her great population, but God will take away her people, and turn her proud boasts into grief [or, mourning].

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.