An overview of recent developments of the discipline which deals with the activity of translation, as well as the implications for Bible translation, is presented. Starting off with a discussion of the disciplinary nature of translation studies, an overview of some developments emphasising the source text, the process of translation, the reception of the translated text, and the cultural-social bound character of translation, is offered. Since the early eighties there has been a tendency within translation studies to move away from the normative and prescriptive approaches to translation and to adopt a descriptive approach towards the study of translated literature. Descriptive translation theorists attempt to account not only for textual strategies in the translated text, but also for the way in which the translation functions in the target cultural system. The implications that these recent theoretical developments have for Bible translation practice and criticism of Bible translations are arrived at in the last instance. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. (Anne Michaels-Fugitive Pieces)

The next revision was the King James Version (1611), which replaced all its predecessors, and which was never replaced for the next four centuries -not even by its revisions.Contribution: Contrary to the fragmentation caused by ordering individual English Bibles either by period (e.g. 20th century) or according to their features (e.g. literal), it is demonstrated that the history of English Bible translation emerged rather as a translation complex, and its history must be understood in this way.

Botanical terms in the Septuagint reveal a mass of uncertain and sometimes contradictory data, owing to the translators’ inadequate and inaccurate understanding of plants. To understand the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of plants, the new approach represented by Biblical Plant Hermeneutics places the taxonomy of flora on a strong ethnological and ethnobotanical basis by studying each plant in situ and gathering indigenous knowledge about the plant and its context in the biblical text. This article applies this methodology to the translation of the Hebrew source text term אֶרֶז [cedar] in the Septuagint as κέδρος [cedar] or κέδρινος (the adjectival form of κέδρος) and its interpretation in the light of lexicography, which lead to contradictory identifications. A complexity theoretical approach is proposed to provide a solution for the various identification choices in the light of lexicography to communicate the cultural values of the Hebrew source text and its Greek translation.

The Bible was composed both by way of oral tradition and by scribal activity. Various descriptions exist of the development and relationship of the dominant forms of orality and scribal tradition throughout the history of media culture. Utilising the insights of, and debate on, the field of Biblical Performance Criticism, this article argues for an articulated description of the interrelationship of oral and written. The article argues that these two aspects cannot be absolutely separated, either chronologically or in terms of importance, neither can they be ignored as part of a coherent model to depict the media history of the Bible. In the light of this model the article discusses the interpretation and translation of the words βιβλίον and βίβλος, which are sometimes misunderstood and mistranslated, because of a failure to understand the process of committing the oral biblical tradition to a preferred writing medium.