Divergences and the sermonic replications in interpreters’ oral interpretation and communication among Pentecostal Churches

Abstract

Oral interpreting in the setting of diverse languages and multicultural congregants is often understood as integrating the message's content to the receiver. Like any communication or campaign, preaching or sermon takes people's multiple contexts seriously. The one who provides the best insight into understanding "the other," traditionally speaking, could be an interpreter in a multilingual context. Nonetheless, there are reflections, replications, and the loss of spiritual communication with sermonic translation and interpretive dialogue. Sometimes, the sermon the preacher delivers is only the one the congregation hears through the interpreter. In other occurrences, however, interpreting can lead not only to distorted messages but also to dissatisfied audiences and preachers being overshadowed by the pranks of the interpreter. Understanding the context of litotes and hyperbolism embedded in rhetoric and the features of the language, no matter how eloquent the preacher is, an understatement, overemphasis, or repetition of words by the interpreter can make or mar the sermon (speech). Using a qualitative methodology, this paper explores the divergences and conventional assumptions about preachers' interpreters as influenced by spirituality, culture, and language from an empirical and theoretical perspective. Biased translation and the basis of reality suppressing or devaluing spiritual/sacred communication are examined. The results indicate that the interpretation of the declaration of guilt, the history of the congregation, spirituality, attitudes, morals, customs, specific practices, the education of the interpreter, and the environment form intertwined interpreting and misinterpretation. The paper concludes by re-examining these qualities and rearticulating them into a preliminary theory for practice, distinguished from theory, which could enhance the development of more sustainable multilingual interpretation in South African Pentecostal churches.