Close-but-clear*
1.
2
3.
4.
5.
6.
Praise Yah. Praise God who is in his sanctuary. Praise him who is in his strong firmament.
Praise him for his achievements. Praise him according to his great greatness.
Praise him with the blast of a horn. Praise him with lyre and lute.
Praise him with drum and dance. Praise him with strings and flute.
Praise him with loud cymbals. Praise him with loud, resounding cymbals.
Let every living creature praise Yah. Praise Yah.
* The "close-but-clear" is a formal-equivalent rendering of the Hebrew. It is based on the interlinear, adjusted for English word-order. It aims to be as close to the Hebrew as possible while still being clear in English.
Lexical Semantics
A crucial element in translating words is knowing the overlap between the cultural associations of the source language and the cultural associations of the receptor language.
We represent this relationship with Venn diagrams, putting the Hebrew cultural associations in green and, in yellow, the cultural associations of the creators of this work (Standard North American English). This exercise has been so helpful we recommend translation projects consider generating their own such diagrams for all key terms in a psalm.
It is useful to know what information is shared by both cultures (in the overlap), and so will readily come across with a standard gloss, what associations will be wrongfully associated with a translation (and so need to be guarded against: in the yellow only), and what associations from the Hebrew may need to be explicitly included, because they are foreign to the local terms (in the green only).
Unit-level Semantics
Expanded Paraphrase
