2025/03/20 by Richard Pleijel · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Historical and Linguistic Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/jbr-2023-0021
openalex publication_date 2025/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/03/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract This article investigates the relationship between translation and reception by focusing on Bible translators as “agents of reception.” Translators exercise their agency in relation to the previous effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ) of the biblical texts, which they can either affirm or resist. The outcome of their work is a specific textual representation of the biblical texts, thereby guiding the way most readers receive ‘the Bible.’ In this sense, translators have a large potential power when it comes to affirming or altering existing patterns of reception. As a case study I focus on two contemporary Swedish translations of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). The first one, Bibel 2000 , was carried out by a team of translators working from the assumptions of ‘secular’ academic biblical criticism, whereas the other, Svenska Folkbibeln , was initiated as a ‘protest’ bible targeted against the methodological atheism or agnosticism of the first translation. These outsets impacted how the two teams related to interpretations associated with Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) effective history of the biblical texts. I investigate how this played out in how the translators rendered certain passages in Genesis – both with respect to the main text (the translated text) and to various paratextual materials produced by the two translator teams. I argue that both teams resisted the effective history of the biblical texts, but in two quite different ways: the team of the conservative ‘protest’ translation resisted effective history on a discursive level, arguing that interpretations associated with Christian effective history were an inherent feature of the biblical texts themselves; while the translators of Bibel 2000 resisted it on a practical level, refusing to let specific effective-historical interpretations play out in their translated texts.