Names of God in Vulgate and the Italian translations of the Old Testament

Abstract

The present publication expands the analysis of the Old Testament translations into different languages. This line of studies was initiated by the works of the late French scholar Philippe Cassuto and one of the authors of this publication. The purpose of the article is to look at the strategies applied in translating the Old Testament names of the Supreme Being into Latin (the Vulgate version) and modern Italian. This purpose is two-fold: by doing so, we also expand the data base of the Old Testament terms‘ renditions in different languages. The article provides the full nomenclature of the names of the Supreme God in the Old-Hebrew (Masoretic) text of the Old Testament, concentrates on their semantics and grammatical structure, and explains the contexts of their use. A canonical Russian-language translation is used as a reference base to illustrate the fate of the original names of the God in translation. The widely-accepted English-language translations of the Old Testament are included to provide a broader perspective on translation strategies applied to this particular aspect of the Old Testament texts. The analyzed Latin and six modern Italian-language translations demonstrate a considerable degree of uniformity in translating the names of God. The Latin and the Italian translations apply the philological strategy to translating the Holy Bible (as opposed to another option presented by the typology of the Bible translation – the ideological strategy). Notwithstanding the relative lexical uniformity of the translations, they demonstrate the differences between Catholic and Protestant versions. The analysis of the Italian translations of the Old Testament contributes to the typology of the Bible translation and ultimately makes an input to the general theory of translation.