How Do You Know It's Dynamic Equivalence?

Nida studied Barth, Bultmann and Tillich (Stine, p. 144).

 

Readers and contributors: Rippon has falsely accused me of saying several things I did not say. Rather than apologize he simply presses his case. Note also that Rippon is self-admittedly not a translator, he is not a linguist, he knows no foreign languages.

Because of these things, I see no need to answer anything Rippon says on this thread any more. I don't enjoy being falsely accused and berated.

I'm happy to answer and interact with anyone else. My next step will be to take a random chapter of the TNIV NT and examine it according to my criteria for a recognizing a DE translation, comparing it with the Greek (which Rippon does not know and therefore can't intelligently comment on). Hopefully I can get to that tomorrow.

 

No, the point is not that there is existentialism in any translation. I believe that would be impossible. Even in a paraphrase you can't put in existentialism when it wasn't in the original document. What I very clearly said is that Nida was influenced by existentialism in developing his theory of translation.

In my view where this comes out most is in his semantics, though there is also influence in his syntax. In his semantics he over-emphasizes the immediate context in determining meaning, in my opinion. In his syntax he is willing to jettison the grammatical forms of the original document and emphasize reader response in the target document, in my opinion.

 

The existentialism in the theory influences the translator's choices. That doesn't mean the translator himself or herself is an existentialist, not at all. He or she probably isn't even aware the theory was influenced by existentialism.

Do you have the Louw-Nida lexicon? Have you tried to use it? If you have you should understand the difference in approach. Before Louw-Nida everyone used BAGD/BDAG as their primary source, or Thayer's or Liddel-Scott before that. Using Louw-Nida is quite different from using those lexicons. For just one example, compare how ekballw is treated in each lexicon.

 

I've already said I was going to take a chapter from the TNIV and work through it.

As for my "charges," what charges? I simply quoted a defender of Nida saying referring to existentialism and Nida. I haven't even said I disagree with existentialism!

Before anyone asks, yes, I disagree with existentialism.

 

Folks, my word has been doubted about Nida. So I'm going to post here what I did several months ago so you can decide for yourself. First of all, here is where Nida speaks very favorably about existentialism.

"It is not at all strange that Existentialism should have arisen in circumstances in which, for many, God is dead and subhuman forms of life have proved inadequate to explain the uniqueness of man. For Existentialism is precisely a system of looking at truth which refuses to accept the supernatural, at least in its traditional forms, and at the same time insists that the answers of Fascism and Communism are no answers at all, and that man is simply not explicable as merely a quantitatively more complicated animal.

Existentialism is not a 'content' philosophy, in the sense of a system of truth, but it offers a very important way of looking at truth, since it raises questions in ways which earlier forms of philosophy have not considered. In fact, societies and periods of history are distinguished, not so much by the answers they give to life, but by the questions they ask, and the ways in which they ask them. In this regard Existentialists have sought to pose some relevant questions about man’s search for meaning, his freedom, his ambiguous relationships to his fellow man, and his incredible capacity for self-deception.

Existentialism cannot be expected to put God back in the heavens, for a way of examining truth is not a technique for proving the existence of anything. But Existentialism has served a very useful purpose in destroying some age-old idols. For one thing, it has exposed, with heartless cynicism, the idea of the inherent goodness of man by turning the spotlight on man’s demonic capacities for evil and self-deception. Existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus have all exposed the moral nakedness of man.

Existentialists, however, have not made man out to be merely a beast or some highly complex animal, but as qualitatively a different 'animal,' not only because he is essentially a user of symbols, but also because he lives constantly in the presence of the great Existential question of life and death—something which makes the human being utterly distinct from other animals

Quite understandably, the Existentialist has also refused to look at man as merely a spectator, sitting on the sidelines of life; for in the Existential view there are no spectators; all men are actors. Moreover, presumed objectivity is not to be found by the person who isolates himself from the very phenomenon he is studying, but rather by the individual who is immersed in it. This means that the best judge of Christianity is not the outsider, who looks in upon Christian behavior, but the Christian who himself participates in the very activity he wishes to describe. In a sense, of course, it also means that complete objectivity (in the traditional sense of the word) is impossible, for we are all—whether we like it or not—a part of the very life we study and evaluate. It is only that we must be honest and fair.

Probably one of the most significant contributions of Existentialism has been its revolt against the mere intellectualization of life. In fact, Existentialists have been emphatic in their denial of thought as a substitute for action or of words as a substitute for life. Theology is thus not religion, any more than grammar is language."

Nida, Eugene A. Religion Across Cultures. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1968, pp. 55-56.

 

Secondly, here is where Nida himself, in his first book on dynamic equivalence, pays homage to existentialist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But even worse in my mind is the credit he gives to Bertrand Russell, who once said, "I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world" (Essay, "Why I Am Not a Christian").

But you be the judge. Here is the quote from Nida:

"As the result of an intense concern for language as a symbolic system, symbolic logicians have also contributed some highly important insights into the problem of meaning, and thus to translation. It is almost inevitable that such men as Bertrand Russell (1940) and L. Wittgenstein (1953), who declared that 'Alle Philosophie ist Sprachphilosophie,' all philosophy is the philosophy of language, should have made important contributions to our understanding of symbols and their meanings. By means of certain new concepts in logic, including: (1) the propositional function, (2) the operational definition, (3) predictive evaluation as the criterion of truth, and (4) the theory of types, the traditional logic of Aristotle was almost completely reversed. Instead of assuming that words have certain meanings, and that the task of the logician is merely to describe what is already an inherent property of such a symbol, the symbolic logicians set up entire systems of symbols, assigned meanings to them, and proceeded to manipulate them as means of testing their values and relationships. In a sense, words were dethroned from the exalted status assigned to them in the Platonic system of 'ideas,' and made to be tools for the manipulation of concepts. The practical result has been the recognition that words are essentially instruments and tools, and that communication is merely one type of behavioral event. In this area some of the most stimulating observations have come from Ernst Cassirer (1933, 1946, 1953) and Willard V. Quine (1959, 1960a and b)."

Nida, Eugene. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1964, p. 7.