Before I say anything, a note to the readers other than Rippon. Judging from long experience with Rippon, no matter what I say he will reject it and probably question my bona fides to even comment on the subject, and especially to disagree with a scholar such as Wendland. For me to counter that I would have to spend time giving my resume, which seems silly and self-centered, so I won't do that. I will point out though that once when Rippon questioned that I am even a linguist, my old friend and former BWM director Dr. Fred Moritz got on one of the few times he has ever posted here, and pointed out that I'm the genuine article. At any rate....
He actually has a two part article.
Near the beginning Wendland says:"It will soon become clear that Luther's procedures are much in keeping with the modern principles of meaning-oriented Bible translation,even though they pre-date them by over four hundred years!"
Wendland says that Functional Equivalence means natural or idiomatic.He kept quoting Luther (translated of course) about the sense of the text,according to the sense. Wenland says that Luther's translation (he revised it 5 times in his own lifetime) was sense-oriented.
The author said that Luther wanted to relinquish words and render the sense. Luther:"Words are to serve and follow the meaning,not the meaning the words."
However, "A concern for naturalness must never be allowed to diminish or distort the intended meaning of a given Greek or Hebrew term."
Wenland lists ten propositions that he thinks guided Luther's translation philosophy. The first one is Priority of Meaning. That is,vs. linguistic form.
The second principle Wendland has is Change of Linguistic Form. R.W. says that "you can't except in relatively few fortuitous cases,retain both form and meaning."
I see no purpose in answering Wendland in detail. My beef is simply with Rippon, who I sincerely doubt understands even the basics of translation theory. (He tries though, and he reads a lot, so I give him credit for that.)
Having said that, I would like to point out that Wendland is of the modern crop of SIL linguists and translators who have taken Nida's theories to a new level. For example, please note that Wendland has discourse analysis as one of his ten points (a strong emphasis of the SIL people nowadays; see
Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation, Essays on Discourse Analysis, ed. by David Alan Black, for essays by SIL people), but it was certainly not a main point of Nida. (My Nida library is in Japan, so I can't determine exactly how much he did talk about it.) So the point here is that the SIL and UBS are in the Beekman/Callow era and have to a certain degree moved past Nida's DE. So Wendland is not that relevant to me on this issue.
Again, Wendland does not say "reader response," but "Monitoring the reception of the message" which is a different thing entirely. So I stand by my stated position that Luther did not seek for reader response and did not speak of it.
