LANGUAGE, STRUCTURE, AND STRATEGY IN ISAIAH 53:1–6        , WORD ORDER, AND THE TRANSLATOR Lénart J. de Regt Händel’s Messiah takes its well-known phrase ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows’ from Isa 53:4. Looking at the context there are reasons to call the rendering ‘surely’ into question. In an attempt to solve this translation problem we will discuss aspects of the language and structure of Isa 53:1–6 and of the strategy that we find at work in this passage. The Hebrew differentiates between presupposed and unexpected information. How can translators communicate this difference effectively to their readers? Relevance Theory is a helpful model towards solving this problem. The conclusions of this linguistic approach and of a number of exegetical commentaries will be compared to see if they are consistent with each other. Introduction Authors enable readers to correlate the message given in the text with the knowledge they have of the world (the referential function of communication). Some of this knowledge they share, some of it they do not yet share. For example, some word order features and specific particles in Isa 53:1–6 point to information which the addressees are already expected to know and relate to (presupposed knowledge), while other parts of the text give information which they are not yet expected to know (unexpected information). The syntactic and pragmatic approach of Michael Rosenbaum helps to show how the difference in informational status between these parts is made in the text. 1 This in turn improves our understanding of the language and structure of this text. Translators face the question how this differentiation and balance between presupposed and new information can be maintained in a translation. Readers of the target text are readers from another culture and will not know what the addressees of the source text would have known. Unless a translation somehow highlights the difference between presupposed and new information, readers of the target text are likely to treat much of the presupposed information as new. Does such highlighting in a translation have repercussions on the translation model which should be chosen? Should the translation confront readers with differences between their culture and the culture of the text (‘foreignization’) or should the translation adapt to the target culture (‘domestication’) when rendering the different types of pragmatic information? 2 Certain Bible translations restore the difference between presupposed and new information more successfully than others do. Thus, only in certain translations does the balance between presupposed and new information resemble the balance in the source text. It is interesting to see that these translations are not all of the same type. Conclusions of an (innovative) syntactic and pragmatic analysis and of a number of (more traditional) exegetical commentaries will be compared. Is a syntactic and pragmatic analysis sufficient to draw out the contrast between presupposed knowledge and unexpected information? Where in the analysis does exegesis come in? Is this linguistic approach still indebted to tradition in the interpretation of this chapter? 1 Michael Rosenbaum, Word-Order Variation in Isaiah 40–55: A Functional Perspective (SSN 35; Assen 1997). 2 On the distinction between foreignizing and domesticating translations see especially Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London 1995).