The Septuagint is the official Old Testament text used by the Greek Orthodox Church. The divinely inspired character of the translation, as it was described in the Letter of Aristeas, assigned to the text an authoritative status not only among the Jewish Diaspora but also among the early Christian communities, leading to a paradox negation of the Septuagint as a translation and its authentication as a completely homologous text to the original. The text still holds its authoritative status among Greek Orthodoxy that, in some sense, annuls any retranslation efforts in vernacular Greek.
This paper aims to examine the Septuagint retranslation efforts from a Greek Orthodox perspective within the historical context from the 19th to 21st centuries. This will be done through an ideological and linguistic lens, taking into consideration the linguistic that troubled the Greek state for almost two hundred years, as well as the ideological aspects of the “(re)translation debate” still present within the Greek context.
About the speaker
Paraskevi Arapoglou was born in Thessaloniki. She holds a Master’s Degree in Translation Studies with a specialization in Literature and Science. After years of working as a freelance translator she also studied Theology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She holds an MA, from the same University, in New Testament and Translation Studies. She is currently working on her PhD in New Testament – Gender and Translation Studies. She has been working for the Hellenic Bible Society as the co-ordinator for several of their projects (the LXX into Modern Greek translation project, the New Testament into Modern Greek translation revision project, the Patristic Citations Database project). Her research interests include translation studies, bible translation, gender studies, ecolinguistics and the Bible, as well as the manuscript tradition of the Byzantine text of the New Testament.
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