Thanks to everyone who commented on my test paragraph in the preceding post. Everyone had good suggestions for improvements. Most, I think, recognized that it was strange English to have the name of my wife repeated so often and felt it would be better English to have pronouns refer to her more often. I agree.
Most, if not all, languages have some language forms which function like English pronouns do. That is, they have some way of indicating that we are still talking about the same person or thing, instead of repeating the name (noun) of that person or thing.
In Cheyenne, the language I have studied for thirty plus years, there are no pronouns. Instead, there are prefixes and suffixes on verbs which allow us to know that we are still talking about the same person or thing.
Koine Greek also uses affixes to give pronominal (pronoun-like) information so that a noun is not repeated too often. But Greek also has available some pronouns to use. If a pronoun is used in addition to a pronominal affix, there is often some kind of emphasis placed on the pronoun, according to those who have studied the functions of tracking of participants throughout Greek discourse.
Pronouns can have very different functions (pragmatic meanings) in different languages. In some languages a proper noun (name) is used throughout a story to indicate who is the hero of that story. Lesser characters are spoken about with pronouns, after they have been introduced into the story. I personally checked a Native American translation where the linguist on the team assumed that this was the case right up until he attended a workshop on discourse structures not long before the translated New Testament for that tribe was published. At the workshop he discovered from analysis of texts in that language that it was the hero of the story who was spoken of with a pronoun. Lesser characters were referred to by proper nouns. He was amazed and realized that he and the rest of the translation team would need to do major revision of the New Testament so that proper names and pronouns were used accurately, to indicate who was the main person or hero in a story.
Well, this brings us to another question which I have wanted to ask you in this series on Bible translation foundations? Here it is:
Should English Bible translators consistently match proper names and other nouns in the biblical language texts with corresponding proper names and nouns in the translation language, and match pronouns (or pronominal prefixes or suffixes) in the biblical languages with English pronouns?
It would be helpful for our discussions if you could provide support from specific verses in the Bible for your answer to the preceding question.
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