Eugene Nida dies Written by
Mona Baker Dr Eugene Nida, a giant and pioneer of Bible translation in the last century, died yesterday, 25 August, aged 96.
The article below is by Dr Philip C. Stine.
Eugene Nida, the giant of Bible translation in the twentieth
century, died in hospital in Brussels on August 25. He was 96.
Conveying the news, his widow Elena said, “My adored husband has passed
away 10 minutes ago. Thank you for your prayers. He was a saint. The
Lord is with him.”
For more than 50 years Eugene Nida was the leader of the translation
program of the American Bible Society, and subsequently the
intellectual leader of the global program of the United Bible
Societies, as well as consultant to that organisation.
Dr Nida will be best remembered for the revolution he brought about
in the field of Bible translation in the mid-twentieth century. The
resulting impact on the growth and development of the Church continues
to be felt as millions of people in hundreds of languages around the
world have access to the Bible because of the approach he developed and
promoted.
Using concepts from linguistics, cultural studies, communication
sciences and psychology, Nida developed a practical approach to
translation he called dynamic equivalence or functional equivalence, the
goal of which was to make the translation clear and understandable as
well as accurate. He also influenced the emerging field of modern
translation studies and is generally acknowledged as having set in
motion the developments that led to that discipline. Through his
numerous books and publications and extraordinary lecture schedule, he
was able to help scholars, translators and specialists in Christian
missions find new ways to think about effective communication.
Nida graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in
1936, summa cum laude, with a major in Greek and minor in Latin. He
received his Masters degree in New Testament Greek in 1939 from the
University of Southern California and doctorate in linguistics from the
University of Michigan in 1943.
In 1943 he joined the American Bible Society and immediately embarked
on extensive travel to work with Bible translators, gradually
developing the dynamic equivalence approach. He was an extraordinarily
effective communicator, and was able to train translators with a wide
range of educational backgrounds how to use his approach. The resulting
translations were both accurate exegetically and understandable. The
Bible has thereby become available and accessible in an unprecedented
way.
When a number of national Bible Societies, including the American
Bible Society, joined together for mutual support and formed the United
Bible Societies in 1946, Nida was present at the founding meeting, and
subsequently was responsible for shaping the translation programs of
the new organisation.
Nida recognised the need for translators to have the very best base
texts to work from, and led major projects on both the Greek New
Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. He was also responsible for a
new approach to lexicography. The Greek-English lexicon project that he
headed up resulted in an invaluable tool for translators.
His legacy continues in the Eugene A Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship at the American Bible Society.
Nida’s wife of 50 years, Althea Lucille Sprague Nida, passed away in
1993. Some time later, he met a distinguished translator and
interpreter, Dr Elena Fernandez-Miranda, whom he married in 1997 and who
survives him.
Dr Philip Stine was Director for Translation, Production and
Distribution Services for the UBS from 1992 to 1998. Prior to that he
was the UBS Translation Services Coordinator (1984-1992), Africa
Regional Translation Coordinator (1982-1984) and a translation
consultant in Africa (1968-1982).
November 11, 1914(1914-11-11)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Died
August 25, 2011(2011-08-25) (aged 96)
Brussels, Belgium
Occupation
Linguist
Spouse
Althea Sprague (m. 1943–1993) «start: (1943)–end+1: (1994)»"Marriage: Althea Sprague to Eugene Nida" Location:(linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Nida)
Dr. Elena Fernadez (1997 to 2011)
奈达先生的著述在中国，影响深远。几乎每一个从事翻译研究与翻译教学的人，或多或少都受益于他的理论：功能对等或动态对等。这里引介一下他的翻译理论与语言学理论（Translation and Linguistic Theories）：
His Ph.D.
dissertation, A Synopsis of English Syntax, was the first full-scale analysis
of a major language according to the "immediate-constituent" theory.
His most notable contribution to translation theory is Dynamic Equivalence,
also known as Functional Equivalence. Nida also developed the
"componential-analysis" technique, which split words into their
components to help determine equivalence in translation (e.g. "bachelor" = male + unmarried). This
is, perhaps, not the best example of the technique, though it is the most
well-known.
Nida's
dynamic-equivalence theory is often held in opposition to the views of philologists who maintain that an understanding
of the source text (ST) can be achieved by
assessing the inter-animation of words on the page, and that meaning is
self-contained within the text (i.e. much more focused on achieving semantic
equivalence).
This theory, along
with other theories of correspondence in translating, are elaborated in his
essay Principles of Correspondence, where Nida
begins by asserting that given that “no two languages are identical, either in
the meanings given to corresponding symbols or in the ways in which symbols are
arranged in phrases and sentences, it stands to reason that there can be no
absolute correspondence between languages. Hence, there can be no fully exact
translations.” While the impact of a translation may be close to the original,
there can be no identity in detail.
Nida then sets
forth the differences in translation, as he would account for it, within three
basic factors: (1) The nature of the message: in some messages the content is
of primary consideration, and in others the form must be given a higher
priority (2) The purpose of the author and of the translator: to give
information on both form and content; to aim at full intelligibility of the
reader so he/she may understand the full implications of the message; for
imperative purposes that aim at not just understanding the translation but also
at ensuring no misunderstanding of the translation. (3) The type of audience:
prospective audiences differ both in decoding ability and in potential interest.
Nida brings in the
reminder that while there are no such things as “identical equivalents” in translating, what one must
in translating seek to do is find the “closest natural equivalent”. Here he
identifies two basic orientations in translating based on two different types
of equivalence: Formal Equivalence (F-E) and Dynamic Equivalence (D-E).
F-E focuses
attention on the message itself, in both form and content. Such translations
then would be concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept to concept. Such a formal
orientation that typifies this type of structural equivalence is called a
“gloss translation” in which the translator aims at reproducing as literally
and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.
The principles
governing an F-E translation would then be: reproduction of grammatical units;
consistency in word usage; and meanings in terms of the source context.
D-E on the other
hand aims at complete “naturalness” of expression. A D-E translation is
directed primarily towards equivalence of response rather than equivalence of
form. The relationship between the target language receptor and message should be
substantially the same as that which existed between the original (source
language) receptors and the message.
The principles
governing a D-E translation then would be: conformance of a translation to the
receptor language and culture as a whole; and the translation
must be in accordance with the context of the message which involves the stylistic selection and arrangement of
message constituents.
Nida and Venuti
have proved that translation studies is a much more complex discipline than may
first appear, with the translator having to look beyond the text itself to
deconstruct on an intra-textual level and decode on a referential
level—assessing culture-specific items, idiom
and figurative language to achieve an understanding of the source text and embark upon creating a
translation which not only transfers what words mean in a given context, but
also recreates the impact of the original text within the limits of the
translator's own language system (linked to this topic: George Steiner, the Hermeneutic Motion,
pragmatics, field, tenor, mode and the locutionary,
illocutionary and perlocutionary). For example, a statement
that Jesus "met" someone must be carefully translated into a language
which distinguishes between "met for the first time", "met
habitually" and simple "met".
Nida was once
criticised for a controversial change in the Revised
Standard Version Bible translation regarding the removal of the word
"virgin" from Isaiah 7:14. However, as Peter Thuesen's book In
Discordance with the Scriptures points out, Nida was not actually a committee
member for that project.
Works：
Published Works
include the following:
. Linguistic
Interludes - (Glendale, CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1944 (Revised
1947))
. The Bible
Translator - (Journal founded and edited by Dr. Nida (retired), 1949- )
. Morphology: The
Descriptive Analysis of Words - (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1949)
. Message and Mission - (Harper, 1960)
. Customs, Culture
and Christianity - (Tyndale Press, 1963)
. Toward a Science
of Translating - (Brill, 1964)
. Religion Across
Cultures - (Harper, 1968)
. The Theory and Practice
of Translation - (Brill, 1969, with C.R. Taber)
. Language
Structure and Translation: Essays - (Stanford University Press, 1975)
. From One
Language to Another - (Nelson, 1986, with Jan de Waard)
. The Greek-English Lexicon of
the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains - (UBS, 1988, with Louw)
