Abstract
From the perspective of Peircean semiotics, people who experience a performed discourse—for example, one that is spoken, sung, and gestured—experience that discourse as a more direct, “real,” and affective experience than when they experience that same discourse by reading it. This distinction is so because performed discourse typically engages many more iconic and indexical sign-object semioses than does read discourse. Therefore, Bible translators who translate written biblical discourse for the express purpose of making that discourse accessible through cultural performance are obliged, first, to discover the distinct, genre-specific, iconic, and indexical performance features of their receptor language and second, champion the inclusion of those performance features in their translation. As a case study of this kind of translation, this article describes the manner in which translators of the Baka Bible translation project in Cameroon translated select passages from the book of Revelation for spoken and sung narrative performance.
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