Variation in Diachronic Translation of Bible

Variation is one of the most commonly used concepts in translatology. To one degree or another, it becomes obvious in an interlingual transfer of texts of various genres; however, first of all, one has to deal with it when translating pieces of fiction (broadly speaking). This becomes especially evident in cases when one and the same source text has several versions in another language (or in other languages). First of all, this applies to the Bible, which surpasses other literary masterpieces in the number of existing translations into different languages and also has the longest tradition of interlingual transfers. Such fact determines the relevance of the subject of this article. Despite a large number of studies on various aspects of the Holy Writ translations, a number of issues related to their variation cannot be considered fully investigated, which makes it possible to speak of the scientific novelty of this article. A few fragments of the versions created in different languages were used as the material for this research, and the method of comparative analysis was applied for their study. The research results lead to the following conclusions: a) the variation in different translations of the selected fragments may be caused by both objective and subjective factors; b) the availability of the so-called “unclarities” in the source text, which allow for different interpretations, leads to significant differences in their representation in the target language; c) the aiming for pragmatic adaptation of the content for a foreign cultural audience in a number of cases entails the replacement of realities, sometimes distorting the actualness shown in the original text; d) modern translations may reflect issues related to political correctness, “an inclusive language”, etc., which do not always correspond to the ideology of the source text.