Rendition of σώφρων and σωφροσύνη in Ukrainian translations of the New Testament
The article focuses on the rendition of the key words of the Christian ethical vocabulary and in Ukrainian translations of the New Testament in comparison with other East Slavic translations in synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The word group covers a range of “intellectual” and “moral” meanings...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Zeitschrift für Slawistik 2023-08, Vol.68 (3), p.440-464 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | The article focuses on the rendition of the key words of the Christian ethical vocabulary
and
in Ukrainian translations of the New Testament in comparison with other East Slavic translations in synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The
word group covers a range of “intellectual” and “moral” meanings in Ancient Greek, which continue to evolve in Hellenistic Greek to denote ‘soundness of mind’, ‘prudence’, ‘discretion’, ‘good sense’, on the one hand, and ‘moderation’, ‘self-control’, ‘temperance’, ‘restraint’, ‘decency’, ‘modesty’, on the other. Retaining such polysemy in the New Testament, the
word group also displays various connotations depending on gender, age and social status. The Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic calques of the
word group mostly accentuate its “moral” meanings, especially the meanings of ‘chastity’ and ‘purity’, which evolve in Christian ascetic literature after the New Testament, although in some cases they retain their primary “intellectual” meanings.
The article also explores the use of semantic equivalents of the
word group in Old Ukrainian, Old Russian and Old Belarusian based on corpora data and historical written monuments. We came to the conclusion that Ukrainian biblical translations of the 19
to early 21
century, as well as some Russian and Belarusian translations, generally take into consideration the polysemy of the
word group in the New Testament, though a great extent of variability of equivalents and a lack of consistent reproduction of gender and age connotations are observed. We argue that the use of certain moral equivalents of the
word group in modern East Slavic translations (in particular, Ukrainian
,
,
, Russian
and Belarusian
) is inappropriate due to the resulting narrowing of their meanings to ‘innocence’, ‘virginity’ and ‘sexual purity’. |
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ISSN: | 0044-3506 2196-7016 |
DOI: | 10.1515/slaw-2023-0022 |