ROGER PEARSE: Is ambiguity in ancient texts a problem for the translator? Roger has some good observations in response to this question, of which I would highlight the point that a good understanding of the genre and literary context of a text is often very important for eliminating ambiguity in a translation. When I first started working on the Hekhalot literature (the Hebrew and Aramaic texts behind Jewish "Merkavah mysticism") some twenty years ago, I was often entirely perplexed about the meaning of a given sentence. But now after working through the entire corpus, reconstructing a critical text of most of it, and producing draft translations of nearly all of it, I usually (not always) have a good idea what such sentences mean. I have become accustomed to the technical terminology and the thought world of the texts, and that makes a great deal of difference.
That said, there are types of ancient texts which are ambiguous (to us) by their very nature. In particular I think of personal letters (of which we have many from antiquity esepcially from cuneiform sources). Because the personal context between the correspondents is lost, it is often very difficult for us to make sense of what is being said. The problem is multiplied if we only have one or a few letters in a longer correspondence. Lapidary inscriptions are also often maddeningly ambiguous, perhaps because the texts tend to be terse and the spatial and social contexts in which an inscription was embedded are now lost.
Also, damaged texts by nature have a higher degree of ambiguity to them. I think of the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular. If a text is fragmentary and we lack crucial hints from the grammar of the sentences and the immediate literary context of the text itself, it becomes correspondingly difficult to decipher the text.
Normally, none of these texts was ambiguous by nature to its original audience. It is only our distance from their original context and, in the case of fragments, the imperfect preservation of the texts themselves, which makes them ambiguous to us.
