To Equivalence and Beyond: Reflections on the Significance of Eugene A. Nida for BibleTranslating1Kenneth A. Cherney, Jr.It’s been said, and it may be true, that there are two kinds of people—those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t. Similarly, there are two approaches to Bible translation—approaches that divide translations into two kinds and those that refuse. The parade example of the former is Jerome’s claim that a translator’s options are finally only two: “word-for-word” or “sense-for-sense.”2 Regardless of whether he intended to, Jerome set the entire conversation about Bible translating on a course from which it would not deviate for more than fifteen hundred years; and some observers in the field of translation studies have come to view Jerome’s “either/or” as an unhelpful rut from which the field has begun to extricate itself only recently and with difficulty.Another familiar dichotomy is the distinction between “formal correspondence” translating on one hand and “dynamic equivalence” (more properly “functional equivalence,” on which see below) on the other. The distinction arose via the work of the most influential figure in the modern history of Bible translating: Eugene Albert Nida (1914-2011). It is impossible to imagine the current state of the field of translation studies, and especially Bible translating, without Nida. Not only is he the unquestioned pioneer of modern, so-called “meaning-based” translating;3 he may be more responsible than any other individual for putting Bibles in the hands of people around the world that they can read and understand.1 This article includes material from the author’s doctoral thesis (still in progress), “Allusion as Translation Problem: Portuguese Versions of Second Isaiah as Test Case” (Stellenbosch University, Drs. Christo Van der Merwe and Hendrik Bosman, promoters).2 Jerome, “Letter to Pammachius,” in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (NY and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 23.3 Nigel Statham, "Nida and 'Functional Equivalence': The Evolution of a Concept, Some Problems, and Some Possible Ways Forward," Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (2005), p. 39.Since his theory of Bible translating was a response to a historical situation, the first objective of this study will be to place Nida in context. Next, I will outline what is meant by “functional equivalence” (FE) and its opposite “formal correspondence” as Nida explained them in his Hauptschriften, noting how his concept of FE shifted over his long career. Only then will some criticisms of FE—fair and otherwise—be examined, and some observations will be made regarding directions that the field has subsequently taken.At that point the matter of the value of “either/or” approaches to the analysis of Bible translations will resurface, and this study will call their value seriously into question. The main problem is not that one can seldom find a pure representative on either side of whatever dichotomy one selects; nor is it the fact that a dichotomy permits an advocate of any method at all to position it as the happy medium between two obviously undesirable extremes. The problem is that an “either/or” approach collapses into two dimensions a problem that is really multi-dimensional. To work along multiple axes, rather than just one, complicates the discussion considerably, but it results in appraisals of Bible translations that are more realistic and useful. Eugene A. Nida in contextEugene Albert Nida was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City. He took his B.A. in classics from UCLA, his master’s in New Testament Greek from USC, and in 1943 his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Michigan. That same year he was ordained a Baptist minister and joined the American Bible Society (ABS). Three years later, he was head of the ABS’s program for Bible translating; and by the time he retired in the early 1990’s he had been directly involved in Bible translations into 200 different languages. Nida was fluent in at least eight languages himself and traveled to 85 countries, and the originality of his scholarship is as amazing as its breadth; for instance, he did ground-breaking work in socio-linguistics before itwas entirely clear that there was such a thing.4 Colleagues and students often remark on the mental agility and openness to criticism that enabled him to hold conclusions lightly and revise them readily. For instance, he was known to tell his students to disregard what he had said in the previous day’s lecture, because last night’s reading had led him to realize that what he had told them was untenable.5To appreciate Nida’s work, however, what is most important is an awareness of the situation faced by Bible societies at his time. In the latter 20th Century, American Protestant missionaries needed Bibles for use in evangelism and church-planting in non-Western settings. Often they were working in oral cultures with weak literary traditions and little or no prior experience with the Bible.6 Where Bible translations existed, they were usually the work of expatriate missionaries who, as non-native speakers, produced painfully unidiomatic renderings that nationals could not understand.7 What was needed was a theoretical foundation for a method of translating that could be readily taught and that produced Bibles that communicated. At the same time, the method had to be justifiable to constituencies back home,8 who could be skeptical (to say the least) of any approach that sounded like it was advocating intentional departures from the ipsissima verba of the Holy Scriptures.4 Strictly speaking, the claim [Philip C. Stine, Let the Words Be Written: The Lasting Influence of Eugene A. Nida, (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004)] that the Oxford English Dictionary credits Nida with the first-ever use of the term “socio-linguistics” does not appear to be accurate. R. W. Burchfield, ed., A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. XIV (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 322.5 Stine, p. 40.6 Lourens De Vries, "Introduction: Methodology of Bible Translating," in Philip A. Noss, ed., A History of Bible Translating (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), p 276.7 Ernst R. Wendland, "Bible Translating and Christian Mission in Africa: ‘How Firm a Foundation?’” Bible Translator 57, no. 4 (2006), p. 207f.8 De Vries.Today, after 40 years of growth in the field of translation studies,9 it may be hard to appreciate the theoretical void into which Nida’s work was launched—but a void it was. The world was introduced to “closest natural equivalence” in Nida’s 1947 book Bible Translating.10 When a more sustained and theoretical treatment entitled Toward a Science of Translating (TASOT) followed 17 years later, it was still virtually the only such work in existence.11 In 1974 Nida followed with Theory and Practice of Translating (TAPOT), written with Charles R. Taber, which is mostly a pedagogically-oriented presentation of the same principles articulated earlier. From One Language to Another (FOLTA), written with Jan de Waard and published in 1986, is a notable advance in certain respects (which will be discussed below).12TASOT, TAPOT, and FOLTA represent Nida’s Hauptschriften. There was a great deal of movement in Nida’s thought, over a career that spanned half a century and produced 40 books and 250 articles; but the foundation laid in TASOT and applied in TAPOT remains fairly consistent throughout.Nida and “Functional Equivalence”In TAPOT, Nida and Taber declare that their approach to translating represents a major shift away from a focus on the original form of the message and toward a focus on the response of the receptor.13 This requires “new attitudes” toward the target languages (or TL’s; the language into which the Scriptures are translated), including these:9 The birth of the field as a “scientific” discipline is usually said to be the delivery of James Holmes’ paper “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” to the International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Copenhagen, 1972. Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995), p. 7.10 Eugene A. Nida, Bible Translating: An Analysis of Principles and Procedures, with Special Reference to Aboriginal Languages (NY: American Bible Society, 1947), p. 13.11 Wendy Porter,"A Brief Look at the Life and Works of Eugene Albert Nida," Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (2005), p.4.12 For instance, it frankly acknowledged that to pit preserving form against preserving meaning is too simplistic. Eugene A. Nida & Jan de Waard, From One Language to Another (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1986), p. 36. 13 Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, Theory and Practice of Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1974), p. 1f.1)“Each language has its own genius” (p. 3). The TL’s unique features must be respected ifcommunication in translation is to be effective (p. 4).2)“Anything that can be said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is anessential element of the message” (p. 4f).3)Structural differences between the source languages (SL’s—Hebrew, Aramaic, andGreek) and the TL’s mean that preserving the content of a message frequently requires a translator to change its form (p. 5f).14“New attitudes” toward the source languages of Scripture were also necessary. These included the recognition that Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek are “subject to the same limitations as any other natural language” (p. 7). The authors of Scripture did not set out to create a religious icon to be unreflectively adored; instead, they—like all authors— wrote in hopes of being read and understood (p. 7f). A Bible translator’s task, therefore, is to re-present the message as its original authors intended it (p. 8), communicating the message as naturally in the target culture as the source text (ST) communicated in its own time and place. The goal is a target text (or TT—the translation) that, in terms of its linguistic form, could pass for an original artifact of the target culture (TC)—in other words, a translation that “does not sound like a translation” (p. 12).Much of this was not entirely “new,” of course; similar interests appear as early as 1530 in Martin Luther’s Open Letter on Translating.15Principle #2 above, however—the view that “anything that can be said in one language can be said in another”— is a direct application of Nida’s training in general linguistics. Earlier Nida had begun to question the assumption that human thought is so inextricably language- and culture-bound that it is virtually impossible for14 Nida never said that the form of a message is inconsequential, and he frequently said the opposite. Cf. e.g. FOLTA, p. 11.15 Wendland, “Martin Luther: The Father of Confessional, Functional-Equivalence Bible Translating,” Notes on Translation vol. 9, no. 1 (1995), pp. 16-36, and vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 47-60.expressions in different languages to have the same meaning—and therefore, it would seem, for persons from different cultures really to communicate.16 Known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (after proponents Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf), this view in its strong form holds that “The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing system for voicing ideas but is itself the shaper of ideas….We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.”17 It follows that persons from different language communities experience reality in profoundly different ways; practically, they may even be said to inhabit different realities altogether.While he was deeply sensitive to the cultural factor in communication, Nida rejected the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,18 and the method in TAPOT is rooted in what might be called its antithesis: the transformational generative grammar of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky emphasized language as a finite set of rules by which an infinite number of utterances can be generated; the emphasis was on identifying these rules and formulating them in equations and diagrams that look like formulas in physics or chemistry.19 A Chomskyan would argue that there is “no scientific evidence that languages dramatically affect their speakers’ way of thinking.”20 This is because human beings do not think in language, but in a universal “mentalese” that is translatable into any language at all. Therefore, any utterance in any language can theoretically be reduced to its pre-linguistic “deep structure”—its essential meaning—and then reconfigured into a “surface structure” whose form may be entirely different. From this two conclusions follow that any translator would find heartening. First, the external form of an utterance is16 Jonathan M. Watt, "The Contributions of Eugene A. Nida to Sociolinguistics,” Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (2005), p. 21; Robert Bascom, "The Role of Culture in Translation, in Bible Translation: Frames of Reference, Timothy Wilt, ed. (Manchester, UK and Northampton, MA: St. Jerome Press, 2003), p.82.17 Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” MIT Technology Review , vol. 42, no. 6 (1940), p. 229f.18 Watt.19 Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints?(Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006), p. 36.20 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (NY: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 48.generally separable from its intended function.21 Second, it should be possible to take any utterance in any language, reduce it to its essential meaning, and reproduce it in another.If this is correct, then a sensible method of translating would entail the following steps:1)Analysis. ST is reduced to its “kernels,” i.e., its basic elements of meaning expressed inthe form of simple sentences.222)Transfer. The kernels are transferred from SL to TL, in a way that preserves not onlytheir semantic content but the relationships between them.233)Restructuring. The result of steps 1 and 2 is reformulated in a way that is natural to theTL, taking into account such features as genre, language register,24 and style.The steps are followed logically rather than strictly chronologically; for example, an experienced translator can move back and forth between “analysis” and “restructuring” quite freely. Here, as elsewhere, Nida consistently advocated a nuanced and sensitive rather than a mechanical application of his method—a point that his critics have not always recognized.The goal, above all, is a translation that communicates. According to the model in FOLTA, communication involves eight elements: the source (in this case, both God the Holy Spirit and the human authors of Scripture), the receptors, the message (in the sense of an utterance’s “deep structure”), the codes (both the linguistic and para-linguistic signs in which the message is embodied), the setting, the sensory channel (eyes and ears, in the case of a written text), the instrumental channel (e.g., the air through which sound passes) and “noise” (anything21Nida granted that sometimes the form of an utterance is an essential element of its meaning; see above.22TAPOT, p. 39ff.23TAPOT, p. 104.24Not to be confused with language difficulty, “register” is a function of the relative status of the participants in the communication and its setting and purpose. These factors determine which linguistic forms will be perceived as appropriate or inappropriate.that can distort a message between the moment of sending by the source and the moment of reception by the receiver).25Nida’s meta-language about communication also suggests what Michael J. Reddy terms the “conduit metaphor”26—a conceptual metaphor so basic27 that it can be hard to talk about talking in any other way. In the conduit metaphor, “language” is a set of packages in which a sender wraps a message for delivery to a receiver via a conduit or communication channel. Breakdowns in communication can result from bad packaging (or “encoding”), bad unwrapping (or “decoding”), packages too big or numerous for the conduit to accommodate, noise clogging the conduit, or any combination of these.28 The translator’s challenge is that s/he is both a receiver and a sender at the same time; s/he stands at midpoint of the conduit, and a mistake in either direction can thwart the communication. The complexity of the task and the numerous possibilities for error mean that successful communication in translation is never more than a matter of probability. The critical factors are the translator’s decoding and encoding skills; but because “anything that can be said in one language can be said in another,” if these skills are up to the task, a message will arrive through the conduit at the target reader (TR) that, if not identical to what the source author encoded, will be at least “equivalent.”As we will see, the concept of “equivalence” became one of the more controversial aspects of Nida’s thought. “Equivalence” could essentially be considered a more nuanced and realistic concept of “accuracy.” The trouble with “accuracy” is that it suggests that a translator sets out to provide TR with a reproduction of the original message in every aspect, a sort of25 FOLTA, p. 11.26 Perry Blackburn, The Code Model of Communication: A Powerful Metaphor in Linguistic Metatheory (Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2007), p. 31.27 On “basic conceptual metaphors” see George Lakoff & Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: U of Chi Press, 1989).28 Compare, e.g., the entry on “channel capacity” in TAPOT, p. 198.photocopy which will be more or less sharp or blurry according to the translator’s skill. In the model of communication outlined above, however, identity of message between source and target texts is neither possible nor necessary. “Equivalence” is sufficient, and “equivalence” is defined in TAPOT as “a very close similarity in meaning, as opposed to similarity in form.” While according to TAPOT “equivalence” is present if ST and TT produce the same cognitive and affective responses in their readers,29 in FOLTA this becomes the expectation—certainly a more realistic one—that readers of a translation “should comprehend the translated text to such an extent that they can understand how the original reader must have understood the original text.”30 By 1986, Nida’s thought had evolved toward a more socio-semiotic concept of “meaning” that takes the differences between source and target cultures more fully into account.31 This underlies FOLTA’s terminological shift from “dynamic” to “functional” equivalence.According to Stine, Nida had originally chosen “dynamic” because he wanted a term with a certain shock value;32 in that event, the shift to “functional” would not have been significant. But there is more to the change than mere terminology, and today “dynamic equivalence” is outdated and should no longer be used; “functional equivalence” (FE) is the correct expression.33 The opponent, however, remains “formal correspondence” throughout,34 and this is defined in TAPOT as:29TAPOT, p. 200.30FOLTA, p. 36. Cp. TASOT, p. 159, and cf. Stephen Pattemore, “Framing Nida: the Relevance of Translation Theory in the United Bible Societies,” in Philip A. Noss, ed., A History of Bible Translation (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), p. 224.31FOLTA, p. 73ff.32 Stine, p. 41.33Nigel Statham, "Nida and 'Functional Equivalence': The Evolution of a Concept, Some Problems, and Some Possible Ways Forward,” Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (2005), p. 37.34 See e.g. FOLTA, p. 37.[a] quality of a translation in which the features of the source text have beenmechanically reproduced in the receptor language. Typically, formalcorrespondence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstandor to labor unduly hard.35There are many representatives of FE translating in English, but the classic—which became a model for Bibles in many other languages—is the Good News Bible.36 The project began in 1961 with a letter to the ABS asking it to recommend a translation for non-native speakers of English. Nida’s opinion was that no existing version was suitable, and he asked collaborator Robert Bratcher to produce a translation of the New Testament. Eventually the project came to be known as Today’s English Version (TEV), which Nida himself called “a model for what we were trying to do.”37 The New Testament was published in book form in 1966 as Good News for Modern Man, and the whole became known as the Good News Bible (GNB).But FE dominated Bible translating in the latter 20th century, and explicit homage is paid to it in the prefaces of too many Bibles to list here. In 1985, in fact, D. A. Carson declared, “Dynamic equivalence has won the day.”38 Today that might be considered an overstatement in view of some criticisms of FE, to which we now turn.Functional Equivalence--CriticismsRecall that Nida’s goal in formulating his approach was a practical, teachable method, with a solid theoretical foundation, which would produce Bibles that communicated on the mission field and which could be defended to constituencies back home. In terms of these35TAPOT, p. 201.36 Stine, p. 80.37 Stine, p. 83.38 D. A. Carson, “The Limits of Dynamic Equivalence in Bible Translation,” Evangelical Review of Theology vol.9, no.3 (July 1985), p. 200.objectives, FE was a dramatic success; but it had its opponents from the beginning. For instance, although the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) contributed Harold K. Moulton (of the Moulton family of Greek scholars) to the TEV project, when the New Testament first appeared the BFBS refused to distribute it because of disagreements with its method of translating.39 In fact, the BFBS did not accept FE until well into the 1970’s, since in its view the approach encouraged unconscionable departures from the sacred text.A response to this argument—that FE is incompatible with a belief in verbal inspiration or a high view of Scripture—is outside the purpose of this study. This is because, as Peter Kirk observes, critics who take this tack “have produced few coherent arguments against the principles, although specific translations have been pilloried with lists of alleged exegetical and theological errors.”40 That is not to suggest that “exegetical and theological errors” are not a serious matter or that they are not to be found in FE Bibles. It is simply to note that most of these critics concede Nida’s point, if only implicitly: a TT whose message is inscrutable—when ST was not—is something less than a faithful representation of its original.41 Most disagreements have not really been about the principles of FE translating, but about what the message of ST actually was in the case of a particular text.Instead, the following will focus on objections to functional equivalence (FE) on translation-theoretic grounds. These include: the Chomskyan linguistics and communication model on which FE is based, the thorny matter of “equivalence,” the consequences of FE for ST’s poetic effects, FE’s prescriptivism, and finally, FE’s stated objective of a translation that “doesn’t sound like a translation.”39 Stine, p. 81.40 Peter Kirk, “Holy Communicative: Current Approaches to Bible Translation Worldwide,” in Lynne Long, ed., Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? (Clevedon, UK and Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2005), online (unpaginated) edition.41 To say nothing of the question:If linguistic form is inviolable, why translate at all?The linguistic foundationIt would be unrealistic to expect anything to remain stable for fifty years in a discipline as fast-moving as linguistics. But recently, Chomskyan transformational grammar—in particular, the effort to uncover universal, pre-linguistic “deep structures”—has fallen on especially hard times.42 Nida has at times been criticized as having derived from Chomskyan linguistics a theory of “meaning” as an impersonal, stable, and universally accessible entity floating somewhere in space prior to its incarnation in words. At times the criticism betrays a postmodernist commitment on the part of the critic, whose real opponent is the notion of a knowable and articulable biblical message;43 other times, it betrays a failure to notice that a “kernels-and-restructuring” technique is noticeably absent from FOLTA (though with nothing as concrete put in its place).44Today the universalist (Chomskyan) vs. relativist (Sapi-Whorf) debate rages unabated,45 and one’s stance crucially determines one’s approach to key issues in translating. More precisely, the connection between thought and language that Chomsky worked so hard to sever is in the process of being rehabilitated, though on grounds quite different from Sapir-Whorf46 and on the basis of much more empirical research.47 Most notably, a connection between thought and language is assumed by the very name of the promising discipline of cognitive linguistics.Briefly, cognitive linguistics blends the notion of meaning as a relationship among abstract symbols with the notion of meaning as reference into a single concept, one that is both42 Pattemore, p. 245.43 Statham, “E. Gentlzer’s Critique of Nida: A Response,” Current Trends in Scripture Translation, UBS Bulletin no. 182/3 (1997), p. 33.44 Statham 2005, p. 41.45 Cp. e.g. Pinker, p. 44ff; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: U. of Chi. Press, 1987), p. 304ff.46 Enio R. Mueller, “The Semantics of Biblical Hebrew: Some Notes from a Cognitive Perspective,”_documentation_EnioRMueller_SemanticsBiblicalHebrew,. Accessed 5/27/2013.47 L. Ronald Ross, "Advances in Linguistic Theory and Their Relevance to Translation,” in Wilt, ed., p. 115.more complex and more realistic than the disembodied universals that preoccupied the Chomskyans. Meaning still entails reference, but it is reference mediated by linguistic categories for both senders and receivers; and this categorizing takes place via loose systems of paradigms and prototypes that are highly culture-specific.48 For instance, most languages have a category something like the English word “friend.” But the prototypical “friend” varies so much among cultures that it would be misleading to consider, e.g., “friend,” amigo, Freund, φίλος, and ערas all pointing to the same reality and thus having the same “meaning.”49 There are still cross-linguistic universals, but far fewer of them than Chomsky thought;50 and to assume difference is usually more productive for cross-language comparisons than to assume similarity.51 As we saw, happily for FE translators, a Chomskyan belief in non-linguistic “deep structures” that many possible “surface structures” are capable of representing implies that function and form can be separated. With the demise of Chomskyan transformative grammar, however, TAPOT’s “exception”—i.e., “unless the form is an essential element of meaning”—seems to widen considerably. Unless one operates with a definition of “meaning” that seems unacceptably narrow, situations in which form and meaning cannot be easily distinguished are not the exception; they are the rule. Consequences for the optimistic view that “anything that can be said in one language can be said in another” would seem to be rather dire.The communication model5248Richard A. Rhodes, “What Linguists Wish Biblical Scholars Knew about Language,” presented orally at the Society for Biblical Literature national meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 19, 2011.49 Ross, p. 133.50 Ross, p. 130.51 Ross, p. 115.52 This section concerns “communication” as the process by which human beings use and process language in general, and not such theological questions as how it is that the biblical message comes to be believed (1 Corinthians 2:14). Put another way, the question is not from where a message receives its power; the question is whether it is a λόγος—an intelligible message—at all.。