RECENT SWEDISH AND NORWEGIAN BIBLE TRANSLATIONS: A TENTATIVE GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, new translations of the Bible were published in continental Scandinavia. Emergence of these translations is associated with a number of factors: the development of the languages, the evolution of translation studies, textology, and exegetics, and the discovery of previously unknown texts. Two recent translations (Sweden, 2000; Norway, 2011) display an innovative approach to the work, combining the contributions of translators, theologians, and stylists. This article considers similarities and differences of the development of the two closely related languages that were revealed from analysis of the translations of the Gospel of Mark. Teams of specialists in various fields worked on bringing the linguistic design of the new texts of the Bible close to the existing written language norm. In linguistic studies of biblical texts and their translations, attention is traditionally given to lexical and phraseological aspects. In contrast to this approach the article discusses the grammatical decisions made in this process. Both morphological categories (grammatical gender, case and verb forms) and syntactic features of translations (sentence length and its structure, textual cohesion) are reviewed in the article. Our research made it possible to identify general trends in the development of Norwegian and Swedish languages (convergence of written and spoken language, elimination of long and complex sentences) as well as divergence in direction of their changes (use of possessive pronouns and constructions) and speed of the changes (loss of case).