Richard Pleijel
About me
I am a researcher at the Institute for Intepreting and Translation Studies, where I am conducting the project "A secular Bible: 'Bibel 2000' at the intersection between religion and politics in postwar Sweden", funded by the Swedish Research Council (2021-02108) and scheduled for three years (2022-2025). The project concerns "Bibel 2000", the latest official Swedish Bible translation which was funded and organized by the state. The aim is to investigate different aspects of the state's involvment with the translation of the Bible during the postwar era, focusing on the arguments for a new translation, arguments on who should be the patron for the translation, but also on the intended recipients of the translation. The way the translation was contested by different groups in society shows that "the Bible" was as much a text as an idea that different groups sought to define. These negotiations are a way to understand the place and function of the Bible in the Swedish postwar era. In the project, I engage with theories from translation history and translation sociology, as well as with recent research in biblical reception studies.
Research projects
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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At the Threshold of the Sacred: Paratextual Retranslation and Institutional Mediation through Footnotes in a Roman Catholic Edition of the New Testament
2022. Richard Pleijel. Paratexts in Translation: Nordic Perspectives, 57-92
ChapterRead more about At the Threshold of the Sacred: Paratextual Retranslation and Institutional Mediation through Footnotes in a Roman Catholic Edition of the New TestamentThis chapter analyzes the footnotes of Katolsk Studiebibel (“Catholic Study Bible”), a Roman Catholic edition of the New Testament in Swedish, published in 2020. The New Testament text of this edition was originally translated by a state-sponsored committee which worked on a translation of the Bible into Swedish from the early 1970s onwards. The intended readership of this translation was the entire Swedish population, regardless of religious belief. As a consequence, the translation would not consider any specific confessional interpretations of the biblical texts. By contrast, Katolsk studiebibel aims to do precisely this, as it mediates a distinctly Catholic understanding of the New Testament texts. This is not done by linguistically retranslating the texts, but by adding a footnote apparatus to the original translation (including its original footnotes). The Catholic footnote apparatus thereby reframes the original translation, as well as the underlying source texts. In the present chapter, this phenomenon is termed paratextual retranslation. It is furthermore suggested that the different understandings of the New Testament texts in, respectively, Katolsk studiebibel and the original translation are an outcome of different institutional frameworks: these affect the paratextual features of the two editions, and their paratexts in turn work to convey the different institutional frameworks.
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Mer än filologi: Textkritiska positioner i Svenska Folkbibeln och Bibel 2000
2022. Richard Pleijel. Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 87, 282-307
ArticleRead more about Mer än filologi: Textkritiska positioner i Svenska Folkbibeln och Bibel 2000The purpose of the paper is to investigate the text-critical positions of two contemporary Old Testament (OT) translations into Swedish, Svenska Folkbibeln and Bibel 2000, and how these positions are affected by various contextual factors. An overarching idea of the paper is that the text-critical position of any given translation is as much a reflection of theological and ideological as philological concerns. In the paper, this is examined with respect to four verses from different OT books, Gen 49:10, Deut 32:8, Is 7:14, and Psa 22:17. Following the survey of how the translations position themselves text-critically in these verses, the relationship between each translation’s position is addressed and discussed. The paper hereby seeks to understand these positions not so much as sharp contrasts, but rather as an outcome of certain mutual outsets. It is argued that the single most important outset for both translations is the historical-critical paradigm in biblical studies, with roots in the early modern era. Translations rejecting historical-critical biblical scholarship (Svenska Folkbibeln), as well as the ones embracing it (Bibel 2000), cannot fail to observe the basic premisses of this research paradigm. In other words, the text-critical positions investigated in the paper are unthinkable outside of this paradigm, which accordingly can be assessed as the single most important contextual factor shaping the text-critical positions of the translations under scrutiny.
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Non-feminist women translators of the Bible: Swedish translator Viveka Heyman as a case in point
2022. Richard Pleijel. Paralleles 34 (1), 106-117
ArticleRead more about Non-feminist women translators of the BibleThis paper discusses the work of Viveka Heyman (1919-2013), the first woman to translate the Hebrew Bible into Swedish. It argues that Heyman’s translation strategies were informed by a radical form of cultural relativism; as a consequence, she rejected all forms of critique of male bias and misogyny in the biblical texts, a critique that according to her was voiced from a present-day cultural context. She contended that such bias was only to be found in interpretations and translations of the biblical texts, and not in the source texts themselves. For a woman translator of the Bible, this stands out as a less common approach. The case of Viveka Heyman is thus used in this study to illustrate how women translators may translate the Bible (and other religious texts) in more ways than one, and for a number of different reasons.
Show all publications by Richard Pleijel at Stockholm University