MARTIN LUTHER
Non-literal or non-accepted translation came tube seen and used as a weapon against the
Church. The most notable example is Martin Luther’s crucially influential translation into East
Central German of the New Testament (1522) and later the Old Testament (1534). Luther
played a pivotal role in the Reformation while, linguistically, his use of a regional yet socially
broad dialect went a long way to reinforcing that form of the German language as standard.
Luther had been heavily criticized by the Church for the addition of the word allein
(‘alone/only’), because there was no equivalent Latin word (e.g. sola) in the ST. The charge was
that the German implies that the individual’s belief is sufficient for a good life, making ‘the work
of the law’ (i.e. religious law) redundant. Luther counters by saying that he was translating into
‘pure, clear German’, 8 where all-in would be used for emphasis.
FAITHFULNESS, SPIRIT AND TRUTH
The concept of fidelity (or at least the translator who wasfidusinterpres, i.e. the ‘faithful interpreter’)
had initially been dismissed as literal word-forward translation by Horace. Indeed, it was not until the
end of the seventeenth century that fidelity really came to be identified with faithfulness to the meaning
rather than the words of the author. Kelly (1979: 206) describes spirit as similarly having two meanings:
the Latin word spirits denotes creative energy or inspiration; proper to literature, but St Augustine used
it to mean the Holy Spirit, and his contemporary St Jerome employed it in both senses. For St Augustine,
spirit and truth (verities) were intertwined, with truth having the sense of ‘content’; for St Jerome, truth
meant the authentic Hebrew text to which he returned in his Vulgate translation. Kelly considers that it
was not until the twelfth century that truth was fully equated with ‘content’.