Introduction: The Painful Business of Bridging the Gaps

Abstract

The business and art of translation is, at present, the subject of intense study. The theory of translation is widely discussed in specialist journals and publications, indicative, perhaps of a growing anxiety in our global village that, as we learn to communicate more quickly and more efficiently at the level of machinery and technology, we nevertheless are increasingly aware of alienation and isolation in human terms. Not least do we become conscious of our inability to receive and interpret the poetic intensity of religious language or the antique subtleties of the ancient languages of the Bible and the often strange literary forms of scripture.