At the Threshold of the Sacred: Paratextual Retranslation and Institutional Mediation through Footnotes in a Roman Catholic Edition of the New Testament

• This chapter analyzes the footnotes of Katolsk Studiebibel (“Catholic Study Bible”), a Roman Catholic edition of the New Testament in Swedish, published in 2020. The New Testament text of this edition was originally translated by a state-sponsored committee which worked on a translation of the Bible into Swedish from the early 1970s onwards. The intended readership of this translation was the entire Swedish population, regardless of religious belief. As a consequence, the translation would not consider any specific confessional interpretations of the biblical texts. By contrast, Katolsk studiebibel aims to do precisely this, as it mediates a distinctly Catholic understanding of the New Testament texts. This is not done by linguistically retranslating the texts, but by adding a footnote apparatus to the original translation (including its original footnotes). The Catholic footnote apparatus thereby reframes the original translation, as well as the underlying source texts. In the present chapter, this phenomenon is termed paratextual retranslation. It is furthermore suggested that the different understandings of the New Testament texts in, respectively, Katolsk studiebibel and the original translation are an outcome of different institutional frameworks: these affect the paratextual features of the two editions, and their paratexts in turn work to convey the different institutional frameworks.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Religionsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- Religious Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Paratexts

New Testament

institutional translation

retranslation

paratextual retranslation

översättningsvetenskap

Translation Studies

nya testamentets exegetik

New Testament Exegesis

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)