Translator as Traitor? The Ethics of Translation

What happens when we stop treating the Bible as a sacred object and start paying attention to how we actually use it? In this conversation, theologian David Dault reflects on interpretation, responsibility, and the ethics of reading scripture in a fractured world.

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Dault reflects on interpretation, responsibility, and how readers shape the meaning and moral impact of the Bible.

Together they discuss the materiality of scripture, translation and betrayal, moral seriousness, scriptural reasoning across traditions, catastrophic love, and the ethical responsibility readers bear for how sacred texts are used.

Episode Highlights

“To assume that we know what a text is telling us is a matter of hubris.”

“The Bible doesn’t tell you to do anything. You as a reader decide what to do.”

“Violence is always an act of interpretation.”

“We never get to a place where everything is clean and everyone benefits.”

“We have to take responsibility for the violence we involve ourselves in.”

About David Dault

David Dault is a theologian, journalist, and media producer whose work explores religion, culture, ethics, and interpretation. He is Executive Producer and host of Things Not Seen: Conversations About Culture and Faith, a nationally distributed public radio program. He teaches in the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Dault’s scholarship focuses on hermeneutics, religion and media, and the ethical implications of how sacred texts are interpreted and used in public life. His book The Accessorized Bible examines the material forms, cultural framing, and interpretive communities that shape how people encounter scripture. He holds degrees in theology and religious studies and frequently writes and lectures on religion, politics, and culture.

Helpful Links And Resources

The Accessorized Bible, by David Dault https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300153125/the-accessorized-bible/

Things Not Seen: Conversations About Culture and Faith https://thingsnotseenradio.com

David Dault’s personal website https://www.daviddault.com/

Show Notes

• The Accessorized Bible—material culture of scripture, design, marketing niches, and the ways the physical form of the Bible shapes how readers interpret and use it
• Bible as object, medium, and cultural artifact; Marshall McLuhan and media theory—the form of a book shaping how ideas move between minds
• Books as technologies of imagination and identity formation; reading as a kind of “magical” transfer of ideas from one mind into another
• “To assume that we know what a text is telling us is a matter of hubris.” Interpretation requires caution, humility, and the recognition that texts exceed our control
• Making the familiar strange again; recovering the power of scripture by refusing to domesticate it or assume we fully understand it
• Franz Rosenzweig on preserving the alienness of sacred texts; debate with Martin Buber on translation and clarity
• Translation as interpretation—translators inevitably carry values, ideologies, and cultural assumptions into the text
• Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence; interpreters “misread” texts in order to wrestle with their influence and generate new meaning
• Reading scripture in community; trust, vulnerability, and shared responsibility among interpreters
• Scriptural reasoning—Jews, Christians, and Muslims reading shared stories (Noah, Abraham, Moses) together without claiming mastery over the text
• Tikkun olam—Jewish ethical tradition of “repairing the world”; the world is wounded and humans participate in its healing
• Repentance and Repair—Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on moral accountability, restitution, and the work of restoring relationships
• Violence embedded in interpretation; moral action always involves choices about attention, resources, and responsibility
• The “flashlight” metaphor—moral attention illuminating one suffering person while another need temporarily falls into shadow
• Jairus’s daughter and the woman with the hemorrhage—competing moral urgencies in the Gospels
• “We never get to a place where everything is clean and everyone benefits.” Moral action always involves tragic limitation and competing responsibilities
• Levinas and infinite responsibility; the ethical demand arising from the face of the person before us
• Moral seriousness versus performative irony; resisting discourse driven by trolling, spectacle, and dopamine-driven outrage
• A Bible Is A Book—dismantling the assumption that sacred texts themselves command moral action
• Steve Martin’s The Jerk and the phone book illustration; a sniper randomly selecting a name and deciding someone should die
• “The Bible doesn’t tell you what to do.” Readers decide what moral actions follow from a text
• Reader responsibility; refusing the excuse “the Bible told me to,” recognizing moral agency belongs to interpreters
• Scripture as “accessory to a crime”—sacred texts used as cover for violence, exclusion, or cruelty
• The Bible as platform—modular text shaped by study notes, editorial commentary, illustrations, and devotional framing
• Study Bibles, children’s Bibles, niche-market editions; publishing strategies shaping the interpretive experience
• Platform logic—similar to Facebook or Twitter; users curate meaning from a shared medium
• Proof-texting and selective quotation; constructing entire moral worlds from isolated passages
• Hannah Arendt on responsibility; loving the world enough to accept responsibility for it
• James Baldwin leaving Paris after the Little Rock crisis; refusing comfort while others bear injustice
• “Someone should have been there with her.” Baldwin’s recognition that solidarity requires leaving safety and standing beside the vulnerable
• Catastrophic love—risking institutions, traditions, and comfort for the sake of vulnerable bodies
• Matthew 25 ethics; encountering Christ among the hungry, imprisoned, and marginalized
• Moral seriousness as daily practice; imperfect responsibility, persistent solidarity, doing what one can today and beginning again tomorrow

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Production Notes

• This podcast featured David Dault
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give