This article claims that the cognitive effects of music on the brain reinforce the Biblical exhortation to “Sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96:1, Colossians 3:16). Then it explores how this is borne out in poetic translations of Biblical Hebrew poetry into indigenous song forms in Natügu [ntu] and English [eng]. The numerous positive results of using sung poetic translations support the psycholinguistic literature, and suggest that to achieve similar benefits it should become standard best practice in Bible translation to set Biblical poetry translations to music.
In view of the emergence of increasingly sophisticated tools for automatic translation, a legitimate question arises: what is the difference between human translation and machine translation, which competence surplus is brought by the human factor, what conditions must be met for human translation to be more perfect than machine translation? The author tries to answer the question discussing different types of competences with particular emphasis on literary competence related to the poetic function of the language. Referring to selected principles of the Translation Studies, postulated in Kubaszczyk (2019), the author argues why human being is still irreplaceable in literary rendering and shows, in reference to Jakobson (1960), how in literary rendering the translator shifts from the selection axis to the combination axis searching for the optimal solution. In the second part of the article, the theoretical argument is supported by empirical evidence.
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