Featured Books on Bible Translation

I got the paperback some years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-T...es+shuttleworth&qid=1572481773&s=books&sr=1-3

 

Looks interesting, and it's brand new.

 

For a reasonably priced book on translation theories in general, including DE, try Exploring Translation Theories, by Anthony Pym, at https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Tr...rds=Anthony+Pym&qid=1572525259&s=books&sr=1-6.

Pym is a very interesting author, and this book is very informative about secular theories, but he also discusses Nida and DE. For a PDF of a glossary of terms by Pym, see: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aa...99.2128034761.1572526362-958943069.1571416871

 

You beat me to it! Venuti is my favorite secular translation author.

 

Translating the New Testament, edited by Stanley Porter and Mark Boda, is an excellent book of essays on three things mentioned on the cover: text, translation, and theology. For you Byzantine Priority comrades, Maurice Robinson has two excellent essays in the "text" section, "Rule 9, Isolated Variants, and the 'Test-Tube' Nature of the NA26/UBS4 Text: A Byzantine-Priority Perspective," and, "The Rich man and Lazarus--Luke 16:19-31: Text-Critical Notes." The first one is followed by an essay by none other than Barbara Aland who, as I recall, appeared to be somewhat convinced by Dr. Robinson's arguments.

The section on translation gets technical (not that the text section is simple) about that area of study, talking about discourse analysis, narrative perspectives, etc. For a book on "Translating the NT," you'd expect more than just three essays, but that is all there is on translation proper.

At any rate, the book will make you think, and that's the truth. And it's good.

 

The third book by Nida, with Jan de Waard, delineating his theory is From One Language to Another, published by Nelson in 1986. He has interesting discussions on communication, rhetoric, and meaning. Other than that, IMO it is simply more of the same; however, Appendix B, "Procedures in Publishing Bible Translations," is helpful.

As you can easily tell, Nida co-wrote quite a few books. Another on translation theory was with a Chinese scholar named Jin Di, first put out 1984. At the time of that first edition, Jin Di was with Nida all the way, but in the revision (2006) he disagrees strongly with Nida's DE, especially in that Nida touts "Greet one another with a firm handshake" instead of "holy kiss." Jin writes on p. 306, "Dr. Nida's further development into the concept of 'functional equivalence' is something that I think cannot be accepted in literary translation."

Nida was apparently not happy with this, and does not mention Jin Di and their book in his own book about his translation ministry, Fascinated by Languages.

 

Good books on the history of Bible translation are as rare as hen's teeth. However, Bruce Metzger has written two of them! Whatever you think of Metzger (who may not have been an inerrantist, according to a somewhat ambiguous quote in one of my books by him), if you want to study the history of Bible translation, you simply have to consult Metzger.

The Early Versions of the New Testament (1977) is already over 40 years old, but still the definitive work on this subject, IMO. His focus is, of course, textual criticism, but there is much in the book about the grammar and semantics of the various ancient languages. For what it's worth, to me it is an excellent resource on the Old Latin versions, and how Jerome revised and retranslated them, producing the Latin Vulgate.

The other book by Metzger is (2001). The Bible in Translation, subtitled "Ancient and English Versions" (2001), and it is another excellent resource. It is a comparatively cheap paperback, so if you are interested in this subject I highly recommend it. A student has borrowed mine, so that's all I can say about it for now. Check it out at: https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Translation-Ancient-English-Versions/dp/0801022827.

 

Anchor Points for Scripture Translation Work is a pamphlet written by the staff of Bibles International, the Bible translation ministry of Baptist Mid Missions. It presents a workable, educated model of literal translation. This ministry has some excellent translation consultants in Hebrew and Greek that travel the globe fostering Bible translations and training translators. The pamphlet was given to me by a friend, a BMM missionary, way back when I was just starting on our Japanese NT.

 

Issues in Missiology, Vol. III, Thoughts About Translation, is by Robert Patton, who did a translation of the Bible from English into Sranantongo. He currently teaches missions at Crown College in TN. It's an interesting read, but wanders from Greek and Hebrew texts through Dean Burgon past English translations, finally arriving at missionary translation late in the book. So the title is apt: it is the author's thoughts about translation and other related issues.

 

If you want to learn about the "gender-neutral" (aka, the "inclusive language") controversy, then you need two books.

On the side of more inclusive language is The Inclusive Language Debate, by D. A. Carson (1998). Now, I'm a believer that almost anything by Carson is worth reading. He's a great scholar. While I disagree with some of his points, I must admit that he does a great job for his side of the debate. For the record, he is very strong in his defense of the NIV, so I certainly disagree with him on the quality of that translation. I'm currently reading Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Cor. for a class I'm taking, and Fee over and over points out errors in the NIV.

Then, we have The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (2000), by Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem, two more great scholars. This view takes the side of the "Colorado Springs Guidelines." (Check that out here: Colorado Springs Guidelines.) All in all, I'm on their side, though the other side (Carson) makes some solid points. (For example, anthropos does not always have to be translated as "man," though it must never be "woman." It can be translated as "person."

One thing is weak in both books, though: a consideration of and help for missionary Bible translation. It's a big wide world out there that we are to reach for Christ. There are over 3000 languages with no Bible. Yet the vast majority of discussion done and money spent goes for English Bible translations, and that's a shame.

 

Another book by secular scholar Lawrence Venuti is The Scandals of Translation, with the subtitle, "Towards an ethics of difference." Though by a secular author, the subject of ethics in translation should be very important to every Bible translator. Is the translator a scholar or just a scribe? Is the translator an author or just a translator?

From my perspective, should the translators of a version remain anonymous, or should their names be easily accessible? I believe that ethically every translator's name should be easily discernable, so that either blame or credit can be affixed.

 

Another good book by a secular author on translation theory is Key Terms in Translation Studies, by Giuseppe Palumbo, a well-known secular scholar from Italy, as his name suggests. He doesn't have a lot about Bible translation, but does have a good section on the thinking of Eugene Nida, correctly describing Nida's usage of the term "receptor": "He makes a point of talking about receptor language instead of target language so as to stress the fact that in translation a message is 'received' by readers rather than 'shot' at a target" (p. 169).

 

Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament, by Eugene Nida and Johannes Louw is an important book. I have it but must confess that I started reading it but have not been able to finish. Other important books have robbed me of reading time. At any rate, note that Louw is also the co-author of the Louw-Nida lexicon, which is based on semantic domains. I have a very hard time with this lexicon, divided as it is into two books. It's hard to access in printed form, and even harder to access in digital form.

Much like his book on "scientific translation," this book claims a scientific basis for his theories (cf p. vii). This is based on the code theory of communication, one of the bases for Nida's theory of translation. "Language as a code can only have meaning in terms of the social setting in which it is used" (p. viii). However, in the minds of many people Nida's code theory model is being replaced by relevance theory. (See the book with that name by Ernst-August Gutt.) At any rate, the very idea that we must understand the "social setting" in which a word is used, takes it out of the realm of science into subjectivity.

Most translators I know would tell you that translation is not a science, but an art. And that is the way secular translation studies is traveling, seeking to examine the translator and how he or she does the work, rather than telling them how to do it like most Bible translation books do--descriptive rather than proscriptive. In other words, don't tell me how to translate; let me tell you how I do it.

 

Mine is in BibleWorks. Oh, well.

 

I recently finished reading Meaning-Based Translation, 2nd ed. (1998), by Mildred L. Larson. This lady was a translator working to translate the Bible for the Aguaruna tribe of Peru. That story is told in Treasure in Clay Pots, by Larson and Lois Dodds, a book well worth reading, though slow going at times. She then went on to get a Ph.D. in linguistics and become the leading exponent or her day of Nida-type theory.

A Bible translator friend recently asked me what I thought of Larson, and I told him it was re-worked Nida; he started to comment, then looked thoughtful. (I hope he agreed, because he's a lot better linguist and translator than I am!)

At any rate, like Nida she puts the emphasis on the receptor language instead of the original. She also refers to code theory much like Nida. And her approach of "meaning-based" translating is very similar to Nida's DE.

Having said all of that, I did get some good out of the book, though I had to plow through its 548 pages of mostly technical stuff. There is some great practical content besides the technical stuff. For example, the chapter on "Testing the Translation" is informative. It helped me put together some notes on back translation together for a student we had interning over in Africa.

There is one puzzling thing about this book. It appears to be aimed mostly at the secular translator rather than the Bible translator per se. Few of the illustrations given are about Bible translation, and there are too few references to the original languages of the Bible.