Missing Matthew's meaning. Or: towards a nodding acquaintance with 'Textual Meaning' (and . maybe, with 'Context' too)

  • Walter K. Winckler Department of General Linguistics Stellenbosch University

Abstract

Ideally the talk I would like to give this morning would be a talk which did equal justice, or equal injustice, to four questions and their answers as discussed in Gutt (1991:chapter 4). Very roughly sketched, these questions and answers are the following:1. "If we accept that a translation should convey. the meaning of the original, can we build a theory of translation on the basis of this requirement?"- "NO"2. "What is the meaning of the original text of Matthew 2?"- "That Jesus' obscure Galilean background poses no real problem to Jewish Christians."3. "Do existing English translations of Matthew 2 succeed in conveying the meaning of the original?"- "NO."4. "What is the cause of this failure?"- "The inevitable part played in verbal communication by assumptions which make up the immediate cognitive environments of the speaker and the audience."
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