Explicit information on translation theory in contemporary Hungarian and English Bible prefaces – a contrastive approach

In this paper, an attempt will be made to present a kind of imprint of the translators’ meta-linguistic activity by examining the preface of the most significant Hungarian Bible translations. This will involve an analysis of how they perceive their own translational and linguistic work, and how they evaluate their own linguistic work in the preface of the volumes. The summarised findings will then be synthesised with the relevant ideas concerning translation and language use, whilst acknowledging that recent studies have brought to light different concepts. The present study will primarily adopt a general linguistic perspective, with the possibility of incorporating a philological viewpoint, and will not utilise the tools of modern translation studies when analysing the texts. The analysis does not deal with the translation theories applied in the Hungarian Bible translations, but a more detailed knowledge of the content of the prefaces may help to gain a deeper understanding of the translation theories behind the translations. Research on the philological or linguistic topic of the prefaces of Bible translations is not new in the field, but an introductory sub-chapter of Christiane Nord’s study (Nord, 2016, pp. 568–569) is somewhat unique in that it employs seventeen English-language prefaces offered by BibleGateway in February 2016. The study’s conclusion asserts that despite the proliferation of 20th-century Bible translation theory and practice, English-language Bibles contain a paucity of information regarding the linguistic and grammatical aspects of translation, the purpose of translations, and strategies for the translation process. The research tries to determine what kind of linguistic information is relevant in the prefaces of Hungarian Bible translations. The aim of this study is to identify the meta-linguistic information in the preface of the Bible translations, and to summarise the content relating to linguistic and translation studies: from early Hungarian translations from the 16–17th century, and from the current translations from the 20–21st century.