Featured Reader Response vs. Authorial Intent

I'm not sure what you mean here.

 

Okay, thank you.

 

So, you might ask, there are a lot of existential philosophers. Who in particular influenced Nida in his creation of DE? Thanks for asking. It was mainly Wittgenstein, but I'll let Nida answer so no one can say I'm misrepresenting him.

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

Now Wittgenstein was bad enough, but Bertrand Russel (not an existentialist) was an immoral, godless atheist who had an awful influence on Western civilization. I'd be ashamed to admit it if he influenced my Bible translation theory.

 

In the area of semantics (the study of meaning), Nida was certainly existentialist. Here is a quote:

"If the problem of describing the area covered by a particular linguistic symbol is difficult, the assigning of boundaries is even more so. The basic reason is that no word ever has precisely the same meaning twice, for each speech event is in a sense unique, involving participants who are constantly changing and referents which are never fixed."
Nida, Eugene. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1964, 48.

In other words, Nida did not believe in any word having a core or base meaning. Admittedly, I can't go too far on this, since I haven't read his book written with Johannes Louw, Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament. I have it and plan to read it this summer.

At any rate, it's not too hard to prove that words retain a core meaning regardless of context. For example, consider the Chinese word 金 (jin in Mandarin, kin in Japanese), meaning "gold." The base meaning has remained the same for 1000's of years, and does not depend on the context. Various languages have different idioms or metaphors using the word, but the base meaning remains the same. It is that yellow metal that people crave.

A certain scholar has used an embarrassing experience of my own in Japan to show this in a journal article. It seems that one day I was talking to a lady in front of the bank who had a little boy, 3-4 years old. I was trying to make friends with the little guy, but he was having none of it. So, I used a word to his mother meaning no, no good, don't like it, etc., いや, iya. then I added an adjective for "seems like," らしい (rashii). The lady got a shocked look on her face, grabbed the little man and stalked off. I thought, "What in the world did I say?" I had used two innocent words together, but did not know until I checked my big dictionary at home that this formed a new word, meaning "perverted." So I had actually said to the lady, "Your boy is a pervert!" Now, she should have had enough context to tell that I did not mean it that way, but the word is a powerful word, and its core meaning carried the day--forget the context!!

So again, in Bible translation every single word in the source text is important and should be translated. God communicated to us in words.

I'll catch everyone again on Monday. Have a great weekend.

 

Reader response is not the reaction of the translator to the original text, but rather how the translator seeks to translate in such a way as to provoke a response identical to that of the original readers. So, a missionary translator working with a PNG tribe will translate in such a way that their response will mirror that of a 1st century Jew or Roman. The translator would thus not render the text in a way that represented his or her own response, but that of the tribal member.

 

I agree except to say that lexicons are not the translator's only source for determining semantic range.