Examining Some Adapted Personal and Place Names in the Ewe Bible

Abstract

This study examined some adapted personal and place names in the Ewe Bible. The purpose of the study was to: (i) find out how personal and place names were adapted from the English Holy Bible into the Ewe Bible by the translators (ii) find out the various forms of adaptation strategies employed and finally (iii) find out if the various adaptation strategies employed suffice the phonotactics of the Ewe language for the realization of their surface forms. The qualitative type of research design was employed in the study. The source of data was purely secondary since the English Holy Bible and the Ewe Holy Bible served as source of data. The study brought to light that non-native segments, clusters and codas were the illicitness the translators employed loanword adaptation strategies such as segmental adaptation, deletion and insertion/epenthesis to repair. Though the Ewe language recognizes these three loanword adaptation strategies, how the translators employed these strategies in adapting the personal and place names from the English Holy Bible into the Ewe Holy Bible does not suffice the phonotactics of the Ewe language. This has the tendency of making reading difficult on the part of readers of the Ewe Bible. Suggestion is therefore made that in future revision of the Ewe Bible, the translators should thoroughly abreast themselves with the grammars of both the source language and target language, so that the repair strategies would be employed judiciously in repairing various illicitness that may be found in the source document.