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This chapter is a reflective commentary on the experience of translating Anna Wierzbicka’s What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English from English into Russian (Vežbickaja, 2021; Wierzbicka, 2019). This book is an attempt to represent the key ideas and events of the Bible using Minimal Language; that is, empirically identified universal language (Goddard, 2018, 2021). The paper focuses on two major issues arising in this translation—the translatability of semantic molecules and the representation of the text written in Minimal Language in its two versions—English and Russian. While a high level of accuracy of translation is expected in such a text, the paper discusses the issues of adequacy and differences. The paper contributes to the field of ethnolinguistics in general and to ethnopragmatics, ethnorhetoric, and ethnophraseology in particular (Peeters, 2007, 2008, 2015, 2016) by identifying universal and language-specific aspects of representation of religious texts in Minimal Language.

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Rendering ‘The Story of God and People’ into Minimal Russian: A Translator’s Commentary

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Anna Gladkova

摘要

This chapter is a reflective commentary on the experience of translating Anna Wierzbicka’s What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English from English into Russian (Vežbickaja, 2021; Wierzbicka, 2019). This book is an attempt to represent the key ideas and events of the Bible using Minimal Language; that is, empirically identified universal language (Goddard, 2018, 2021). The paper focuses on two major issues arising in this translation—the translatability of semantic molecules and the representation of the text written in Minimal Language in its two versions—English and Russian. While a high level of accuracy of translation is expected in such a text, the paper discusses the issues of adequacy and differences. The paper contributes to the field of ethnolinguistics in general and to ethnopragmatics, ethnorhetoric, and ethnophraseology in particular (Peeters, 2007, 2008, 2015, 2016) by identifying universal and language-specific aspects of representation of religious texts in Minimal Language.