addressing God

Translators of different languages have found different ways with what kind of formality God is addressed. The first example is from a language where God is always addressed distinctly formal whereas the second is one where the opposite choice was made.

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Like many languages (but unlike Greek or Hebrew or English), Tuvan uses a formal vs. informal 2nd person pronoun (a familiar vs. a respectful “you”). Unlike other languages that have this feature, however, the translators of the Tuvan Bible have attempted to be very consistent in using the different forms of address in every case a 2nd person pronoun has to be used in the translation of the biblical text.

As Voinov shows in Pronominal Theology in Translating the Gospels (in: The Bible Translator 2002, p. 210ff. ), the choice to use either of the pronouns many times involved theological judgment. While the formal pronoun can signal personal distance or a social/power distance between the speaker and addressee, the informal pronoun can indicate familiarity or social/power equality between speaker and addressee.

In these verses, in which humans address God, the informal, familiar pronoun is used that communicates closeness.

Voinov notes that “in the Tuvan Bible, God is only addressed with the informal pronoun. No exceptions. An interesting thing about this is that I’ve heard new Tuvan believers praying with the formal form to God until they are corrected by other Christians who tell them that God is close to us so we should address him with the informal pronoun. As a result, the informal pronoun is the only one that is used in praying to God among the Tuvan church.”

In Gbaya, “a superior, whether father, uncle, or older brother, mother, aunt, or older sister, president, governor, or chief, is never addressed in the singular unless the speaker intends a deliberate insult. When addressing the superior face to face, the second person plural pronoun ɛ́nɛ́ or ‘you (pl.)’ is used, similar to the French usage of vous.

Accordingly, the translators of the current version of the Gbaya Bible chose to use the plural ɛ́nɛ́ to address God. There are a few exceptions. In Psalms 86:8, 97:9, and 138:1, God is addressed alongside other “gods,” and here the third person pronoun o is used to avoid confusion about who is being addressed. In several New Testament passages (Matthew 21:23, 26:68, 27:40, Mark 11:28, Luke 20:2, 23:37, as well as in Jesus’ interaction with Pilate and Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well) the less courteous form for Jesus is used to indicate ignorance of his position or mocking (source Philip Noss).

In Dutch and Western Frisian translations, however, God is always addressed with the formal pronoun.

See also female second person singular pronoun in Psalms.

Translation commentary on Baruch 3:3

Thou art enthroned for ever is literally “you are seated forever,” but this obviously means seated as king, so an easy and effective equivalent is “You reign as king forever” (Good News Translation; similarly Contemporary English Version). In some languages, though, the equivalent will be simply “You reign [or, rule] forever,” since “reign” includes the idea of “king.” In other languages it is necessary to show the object of “reign”; for example, “You rule over everything forever.”

And we are perishing for ever: This clause, which is in contrast to the previous one, is more difficult to understand. For a group of people to be dying for ever can apparently mean one of two things. Is it talking about the death of individuals or the death of the whole Jewish nation? Is the writer grieving that human beings die (as Good News Translation seems to be saying), or that the Jewish nation is in danger of extinction? He could indeed mean just that—that just as God sits eternally enthroned, the Jews, his people, are dying out and once gone, they are gone forever. In this context the second of these interpretations is to be favored. This whole prayer is spoken by the Jewish community about themselves and on their own behalf. Nowhere else in the prayer is the human situation spoken of in the abstract. If we accept this, we could take it to mean “but we are dying out, and will vanish forever.” The reader would take the pronoun “we” to refer to the Jews, as elsewhere in the prayer. This solution will also fit in beautifully with the solution suggested for a larger problem in the next verse (see the comments there). However, if translators disagree with this interpretation, the Good News Translation wording could be expressed more clearly as “but we human beings die and are gone forever.”

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.