🪟 A Window into My Research
A Window into My Research
Most of my emails present work that I have already finished. In this email, I wanted to give you a window into my current projects. All of them center around supporting the work of oral Bible translation.
Emotion Exegesis Project
For the last 18 months, most of my time not learning how to be a parent has gone into trying to wrap my mind around how translators can identify and translate emotions in the Scriptures into other cultural contexts. There are no manuals on this subject. I have also not found any manuals on how to do this for secular literature.
So, last summer, after reading dozens of articles and a few books, I began to piece together my own method. Now I have read over 150 articles and book chapters and browsed well over 1,000, saving another 200+ to reference later. My copious notes on this topic have naturally led to a few presentations and to a paper I am excited to tell you about.
"Toward a Method for Exegeting Emotions in the Bible for Higher Quality Translation" will be a chapter in a volume about the frontiers of quality in Bible translation; the book will be titled Quality in Translation: A Multi-Threaded Fabric. In my 30-page paper, I synthesize the most relevant and widely accepted research on emotion into a method Bible translators and scholars can use to investigate emotions in the Bible. My paper makes two new contributions to translation studies: (1) synthesizing theoretical perspectives on emotion, and (2) presenting translators with a survey of factors that must be taken into account when translating emotions.
Here's a simple visualization of the paper:
This paper will serve as my own groundwork for systematic investigations of the emotions in each passage of the Bible. I don't know who will join me, but I plan on continuing to shed much-needed light on the emotional dynamics of biblical passages. Oral and sign translators need this information, and every pastor, teacher, and songwriter could benefit from it as well.
Here's a little timeline for how, Lord willing, the project will progress:
I'm excited to keep you all updated on the journey!
My work on emotion exegesis has been my primary project, but I have several others in the works. Let me know if you would like to hear more about these projects by filling out this survey.
Challenge for You
The slogan "see a need, meet a need" may be best applied to needs that (1) you are uniquely fit to meet and (2) most deeply affect the most people.
Pray that God helps you identify these areas in your life.