DOGMATIC EQUIVALENCE: A KEY TO LITURGICAL TRANSLATION?

The article presents the fundamentals of liturgical translation in search for the core of this partial translation theory. Liturgical texts are known to combine three dimensions of religious discourse: semantics (especially dogmatic exegesis), poetics (the specifi c poetics of original Hebrew and Greek texts) and performability (covering particular features of aural perception). The history of investigating liturgical translation counts at least a century. Exactly 100 years ago, Ukrainian researcher Ivan Ohiyenko published a seminal paper whose issues and ideas were repeated and reverberated in most further studies which directly and specifi cally dealt with biblical phrasing cited in the Liturgy, doctrinal correctness and ideological infl uences, matters of interpretative and temporal retranslations, the problem of the correlation between the poetics of the original languages and that of the target language, relevant sound and music qualities of the text. Linguistic patterns and theological hermeneutics shape a special type of equivalence which is applicable to texts for liturgical use – dogmatic equivalence, which can be viewed from four perspectives: terminological essence; lexical or cultural ortheological interpretation; grammatical meaningfulness; phonetic means for theological interpretation and liturgical performability. It is a diffi cult task to keep a proper balance between the attitude of linguists (who concentrate on relations between a sacred text and a reading community) and that of theologians (who stress on the authoritative status of a sacred text although overlook cultural historicity). Thus, dogmatic equivalence is a structural phenomenon which can be divided into diff erent levels, components or dimensions. The interconnection of translation problems will have to deploy the approbated solutions from sci-tech, poetry and literary translation. The revoiltinary principle which is to be acknowledged properly is that even liturgical translation can benefi t from linguistic experimenting. Key words: translation theory, liturgical translation, interpretation, equivalence, cultural norms.