Deverbalising the biblical text for translation and interpreting

Abstract

Deverbalisation is the technique of sentence decomposition in order to arrive at sentence meaning. Every sentence is made up of words, which in themselves could be lexical or grammatical. These two forms of the word blend according to the rules of grammar of the language to give rise to phrases, clauses and sentences of differing forms and types. In deverbalising a text, lexical items and expressions are studied and comprehended either as vocabulary, belonging to everyday usage or as terms, belonging to specific disciplines for the purpose of talking about themselves. Sentential constructions are viewed syntactically as having denotative or surface meanings of every day usage or as having connotative, literary, deep-structure meaning. Terms and connotative expressions lead the text translator and interpreter into terminological research and supplementary reading, in order to arrive at the adequate meaning of the text. Deverbalisation is so important because translation or interpreting is a re-expression of what is comprehended textually. Comprehension itself has to do with selecting the essentials in a text. The essentials in a text would include the theme and sub-themes, ideas, messages, information, doctrines, phenomena and concepts contained in it. Therefore, comprehension becomes a “given” in translation and interpreting through deverbalisation.