Is Dynamic Equivalence a Bad Thing?

Actually, the parables are easy to translate, because they are narrative. I would rather translate the Gospels than Romans any old day (and I've translated Matthew, John and Romans into Japanese). Dynamic equivalence renderings are rarely needed in the narratives of the Bible, IMO--and think how much of the Bible is narrative!! In the NT alone, you have the Gospels, Acts and Revelation (yes, Revelation is narrative), which accounts for 66.4% of the NT!!

Concerning those in a rice-based economy understanding the agrarian parables, that is extreme generalization. The truth is, in almost all countries nowadays where the staple food is rice, many other crops are grown. Here in our area, I could show you corn and wheat fields almost as easily as rice fields. And a good friend of my wife's has a gorgeous English garden that people come from miles away to see! The rice-eating world is much more civilized than you seem to think.

Concerning poetry, I will grant you that poetry is the most difficult genre to translate. Putting an English song into Japanese is almost impossible because of the large number of syllables Japanese has in comparison. As for putting a Japanese haiku verse into English, mama mia!

Here is the fascinating thing, though. Hebrew poetry (and in addition to the OT poetic books, the poetic passages of the NT are largely Hebrew poetry) is not limited to a set number of syllables as is haiku, and does not rhyme as most of English poetry does. It is based on parallelism, and is thus easy to translate! God's plan is wonderful, amen? raise:

 

Is Dynamic Equvalence a Bad thing?

So he muffed or muddled middlin, does it matter much?

One of the reasons I enjoy a more literal translation is that you can see the Hebrew poetry a bit more clearly (if you’re looking for it) without reaching into the original language.

Is there an inspired form of poetry?
I thought I’d save post # 2442 for a discussion of Hebrew poetry.:flower:
Is all other poetry lessened because it doesn't fit biblical standards? :tongue3:

One might say so.

Some denigrate the NAS for its somewhat cumbersome sentence structure (all very true); it fits my needs and desires very well.

Rob

 

Please change that last line to:

Some denigrate the NAS for its somewhat stilted sentence structure (all very true); it fits my situation suitably. :smilewinkgrin:

Rob

 

:laugh: :laugh:

 

Do what?

Off topic post snipped

 

Personally? I never, ever call a translation of God's Holy Word a "bad thing." (I have a friend who is now KJVO but got saved through the Living Bible!) But it does have some mistaken translations in it.

 

Friday is my translation day. This morning I translated 20 verses from Acts, then this afternoon our committee met to polish John 21. I thought I would share with you some facts about the verses I translated, Acts 4:13-32.

I ended up with 541 words in Japanese. Of those, 21 words were Japanese keigo (polite language), with either a polite prefix ("honorable Word of God," for example) or a verb ending making it polite (but not changing the literal meaning). Thus, only 3.9% of the words of my translation were polite, contrary to the wild guess of El_guero of 50-80%. My use of the keigo is fairly standard, comparable to other versions, and the committee will not revise it.

There were 16 words (only 3%) I rendered more freely than strictly literal, and since my supper is almost ready I will post those later so you can judge for yourself. I'm not going to miss my wife's good supper even for this fascinating thread! She just called me! :tongue3: :smilewinkgrin:

 

Okay, in my translation of Acts 4:13-32, here are the places I did not translate with formal equivalence (slavishly literal).

In v. 14, I could not find a way to literally translate the force of the Greek imperfect into Japanese. Instead I added a particle (of which Japanese has plenty) and a "be" verb to try to get the same force.

In vv. 13 and 14, I used "the two" for the Greek pronoun "they" three times. The reason for this is that while Japanese does have pronouns, it does not use them very well. For example, there can be a sexual connotation if the translator is not careful.

In vv. 16, 21 and 24 I used okonawareta,"to perform," for ginomai.
Actually, I think this is a very close rendering, and shouldn't be considered a free rendering at all. But just to be fair, I included it because there is a slight doubt in my mind.

In v. 17, the Greek has an interesting idiom, "threaten a threat." Translating this literally would only confuse the Japanese reader, and there is no equivalent idiom in Japanese, so according to optimal equivalence I had to choose the Japanese rendering that gives the same meaning as the original idiom. I chose words that mean "strictly threaten." DE would have looked for words with the same impact rather than the exact same meaning.

V. 18--Many times Japanese uses personal names instead of pronouns. I did that in this verse.

In v. 19, the Greek krinw (krino) occurs. There are no Japanese words which combine the meanings this word has, so I had to choose one. Instead of the Japanese word for "to judge judicially" I chose the word for "discern."

In v. 23, the Greek has literally, "the their own." The NKJV gives "their own companions," and I translated similarly into Japanese.

In v. 25 I split the Greek sentence into two Japanese sentences. This is often necessary, especially in Paul's writings. Man, that apostle wrote long sentences!

In vv. 25 and 30, the Greek has paiV (pais), which can be translated as either "child" or "servant." I chose "servant," though either could fit here, because uioV (uios) is the word almost always (maybe always) used for Jesus as God's Son.

In v. 26 we have a good one. Where the KJV has "rage," the original word occurs only here in the NT. It is an old word for "neigh" (as in what a horse does). I chose to translate literally and thus preserve the personification of the original (as per optimal equivalence). However, according to classical Greek usage, there is a metaphorical usage of the word, so the KJV is not wrong. Should I not have translated literally here?

In v. 29 they pray, "grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word" (KJV). I supplied an object for the word "grant," the word chikara, which in this case means ability.

Okay, DE/de advocates. I challenge you. Look through this passage and tell me: did I translate with DE/de? Should I have in places where I didn't? And tell me why.

 

OK

IM Sorry, What is Dynamic Equivalence and what is the difference between it and some of the reasons, dynamic equivalence translations of the Bible are often used for everyday reading and devotionals, while serious Bible students usually prefer a formal equivalence translation?

 

William, if you will look at the top of page two, you will see a scholarly definition of the translation method called Dynamnic Equivalence. If you will look a couple of pages later you will see a definition by TCassidy for dynamic equivalence (de, lower case), which for the purposes of this thread is a freer rendering of the original languages.

Formal equivalence hasn't been discussed much on this thread, but it is a translation method or philosophy which tries to bring every aspect of the original language into the translation, including word order. Contrary to popular opinion, there are actually very few real formal equivalence translations out there in the technical sense. Young's Literal Translation is one. I find it useful occasionally to remind me of the syntax of the original languages. The NASV is often called formal equivalence, but I prefer to call it a very literal translation, since it doesn't try to preserve the word order of the originals and it doesn't translate by "concordance" (using the exact same word in every case for the original language word). If you will look in the front of an NASV you will find a brief statement of their translation philosophy. :type:

 

Very good!

Thanx alot!

 

First,

I will apologize for your reading your dynamic equvilant into what I wrote.

 

Second,

I stand corrected. You stated that 3.9% of your words were chosen to be polite. Therefore, 96.1 percent were chosen to not be polite. That adds up to 100%. I guess that my wild guess was low.

 

Brother Tony,

The intent of the translator (the preacher or the reader) can be a greater evil than the tool of dynamic equivalence. I think the focus upon the intent of some translators has been necessary. Wescott, Hort, et. al., have sometimes been less than scholarly in their work. This has led to a disdain for scholarship within some groups of believers.

The greatest single problem in translating the GNT to another language is that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND the Greek idiom. We have NO extant speakers of the language. All we can do is become fluent with the lexical (dictionary) meaning of the words and feel our way from there.

The problem with the dictionary approach is intent of the writer (speaker) CAN be lost. Inuendo, pun, and other allusions in the text are no longer fathomable (yes I realize that there IS research into this area - but, we are 2,000 years removed).

The loss of intent that always comes to my mind was the dialugue during the trial of Christ. Pilate was speaking from a Roman POV (point of view). He had spiritual suppositions that led him to believe that Jesus was the "King of the Jews". His religious beliefs behind his words DO NOT come through in a literal reading. His allusions are powerful. But, my understanding of his words come after much study (weak though my scholarship is) and an ability to see that his animistic beliefs are mirrored in other cultures that I am familiar with. Digging deeply beneath the text on a recurring basis is not available to most students of the Word.

Most students of the Word go to a dynamic equivalence session weekly. Sermons are expositionally bringing the text of the Scripture to a better (dynamic) understanding (equivalence).

IMHO, if we want to discredit dynamic equivalence, I would ask: what do we do with preachers?

Because there is tension between the Word and understanding the Word, I read (and re-read) the text of Scripture 5 - 7 times during a sermon. I have preached where more than half of the sermon was Biblical text. IMHO, I am not comfortable with saying that this is the Word of God, but you need to listen to me for the next 30 - 50 minutes.

Even though I believe that dynamic equivalence is important for translation - I am wary of those that so easily misuse it. Rather than misuse dynamic equivalence, an interlinear text is a better choice.

 

Friend, if you don't understand the Japanese language, don't comment on it. You hurt your own image by that.

The fact that 3.9% of my translation words were keigo (Japanese honorific language) does not mean that 96.1% of the translation is "chosen to not be polite" as you quaintly put it. It means that 96.1% of the translation is neutral. Most of that is narrative, in which case it is written in the standard literary Japanese, neither polite nor impolite. Actual zokugo (slang) or impolite language is reserved for the occasional conversational sentence in which the speaker (the Jewish authorities, for example) are feeling superior to the people they are talking to ("unlearned and ignorant" apostles).:type:

 

Actually, there is plenty of lexical evidence for most Greek words. We have far more koine documents nowadays than we did 100 years ago, and are able to define with accuracy most koine words. Check your BAGD if you have one, and look at all the references to other literature. Then compare that to an older lexicon such as Abbot-Smith's or Thayer's, and you'll see a big difference.

What in the world is a "dictionary approach" to translating? I've never known anyone who could succeed at any kind of translation without a dictionary! Sorry, I just don't know what you are saying here!

Historical note: I was down at a bookstore in Tokyo some years ago which had a lot of great linguistic tomes. There it was--the Burmese-English dictionary compiled by Adoniram Judson in the 19th century, still for sale! The man was awesome: wrote the first Burmese tract, dictionary and grammar, and translated the first Burmese Bible! (Not by the DE method, by the way!)

You are mixing up translation and exegesis here. They are not the same thing. I have known preachers who could translate on the fly in the pulpit (Dr. Monroe Parker, for one), but they are few and far between. :type: