middle of the night

In Gbaya, the notion of the night is emphasized in the referenced verses with kerere, an ideophone that indicates the middle of the night.

Ideophones are a class of sound symbolic words expressing human sensation that are used as literary devices in many African languages. (Source: Philip Noss)

complete verse (Job 5:14)

Following are a number of back-translations as well as a sample translation for translators of Job 5:14:

  • Kupsabiny: “Darkness covers those people in the day
    and they grope around as if it was night.” (Source: Kupsabiny Back Translation)
  • Newari: “In their daytime comes darkness,
    in the afternoon they keep on groping in the dark, like at night.” (Source: Newari Back Translation)
  • Hiligaynon: “They are-in darkened even-though (it is) day-time, and they are-groping as-if (it is) night-time even-though (it is) noon-day.” (Source: Hiligaynon Back Translation)

Translation commentary on Job 5:14

They meet with darkness in the daytime: Eliphaz expands the picture to describe how those who seek advantage over others are brought down. Like the Syrians whom Elisha led to Samaria in broad daylight (2 Kings 6.18-23), they run into darkness. Line a in the Hebrew has the order “by day, by night,” and line b reverses this order to “night, day.” The two lines are parallel. Line a uses the common verb meaning to meet or encounter, while line b shifts to the more specific and striking grope, which means to feel about as if blind or in the dark. The same verb is used in Deuteronomy 28.29, “You shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in the darkness.” Job will return to this theme in 12.25. Grope in line b steps up the poetic intensity and gives greater coherence to the two-line parallelism. By reducing the two lines of verse 14 to one, Good News Translation does not retain the poetic intensification and unity of the lines, which may be rendered in English “In daylight they run into darkness; in broad daylight they grope like blind men in the dark.” This may also be translated, for example, “When it is light they are in the dark, and in broad daylight they stumble like blind persons in the dark.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, Wiliam. A Handbook on Job. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .