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Very dynamic!

 

They would bordering on Living Bible!

 

Good grief. Am I that ignorant? How about just paraphrase. Or "free." Or "thought for thought."

 

Here are a couple more critiques of Nida's theories by Venuti:

“Nida’s humanism may appear to be democratic in its appeal to ‘that which unites mankind,’ but this is contradicted by the more exclusionary values that inform his theory of translation, specifically Christian evangelism and cultural elitism.” (The Translator’s Invisibility, 17).

“Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation goes hand in hand with an evangelical zeal that seeks to impose on English-language readers a specific dialect of English, current standard usage, as well as a distinctly Christian understanding of the Bible. When Nida’s translator identifies with the translating-language reader to communicate the foreign text, he simultaneously excludes other constituencies in the receiving culture” (The Translator’s Invisibility, 18).

Now what is interesting here is my own reader response. I want to say, "Good for Nida. He wants to win souls." But then I remember that he himself never gives evangelism as a reason for or goal of Bible translation. Still....

 

As I said, I've not read them. But I've got plenty of terms to classify them when and if I ever read them.

I gave several definitions there in Post #2.

I see.

You're got me there. I was speaking off the cuff, as you say. What is actually 1000's of years old is the term "sense for sense," which goes back to Cicero and Horace in the first century BC, along with "word for word." Jerome also used these two terms in his "Letter to Pammachius." Both of these cases are well known, but I can give you documentation if you insist.

It really doesn't matter to me. I only gave "paraphrase" as one possibility of what I might call those versions. When I teach what is wrong with paraphrasing, I use a terrible Japanese paraphrase. I don't have any need to know about those translations. I simply gave "paraphrase" and those other terms as examples of what I might classify them as. Doesn't mean I think they are paraphrases.

 

Venuti again, writing a bout DE as paraphrase:

“Eugene Nida, drawing on research from the American Bible Society, considers the problem of translating between different realities. He argues that solutions need to be ethnological, based on the translator’s acquisition of sufficient ‘cultural information.’ Since ‘it is inconceivable to a Maya Indian that any place should not have vegetation unless it has been cleared for a maize-field,’ Nida concludes that the Bible translator ‘must translate “desert” as “an abandoned place”’ to establish ‘the cultural equivalent of the desert of Palestine’ (Nida 1945: 197). Here translation is paraphrase. It works to reduce linguistic and cultural differences to a shared referent. Yet the referent is clearly a core of meaning constructed by the translator and weighted toward the receiving culture so as to be comprehensible there" (Intro to “1940s-1950s” in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., p. 113).

 

Again, translators primary objective is to get what was intended meaning to them, not what we think it should have been!

 

Wayne Grudem rejects the term "formal equivalence" for literal translations, as I do. He writers, "I do not generally use the phrase 'formal equivalence' nor do I think it is a useful phrase for describing essentially literal translations."
("Are Only Some Words of Scripture Breathed Out by God?" in Translating Truth, p. 20).

 

Since the Holy Spirit inspired word by word, should not translator strive to do the same as much as is possible?

 

I said do that whenever possible!