Loyalty Revisited

Abstract

Loyalty is understood as an ethical concept governing translators’ responsibility to their partners in the cooperative activity of translation, beyond ‘fidelity’ as a relation between texts. It may operate within the frame of functionalism, understood as a set of strategies that give priority to the intended purpose of the target text. These concepts become key in cases where there is a wide gap between the source and target cultures, especially when receivers have their own ‘subjective theories’ about the ideal role of the translator. In the case of a translation of the New Testament and Early Christian texts into German by the Heidelberg theologian Klaus Berger and Christiane Nord, it is found that reviewers’ reactions were based on absolutist conceptions of their own subjective theories. In such a context, loyalty can be achieved by making the translation strategies explicit in a preface, by adopting clear choices at points of source-text ambiguity, and by using the most advanced theological and philological scholarship to ensure loyalty to the source-text author’s intentions.

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