Featured Textbooks on Translating

So, the family just went and voted early, stopped at DD and got coffee and donuts. I'm now back in my office needing to relax, so I assumed my new superhero identity as "The Masked Prof." (See my avatar, note the TDNT on the shelves and the USA on my mask.)

This thread is on books used as or possible for a textbook for a class on translation (Bible or secular). If you believe you are knowledgeable enough on translation, and it is useless to gain more knowledge, you will avoid this thread. But if you wish to grow in your bibliology, I think we can sharpen each other. Also, this thread should avoid rancor. I mean, how can we get in trouble just talking about books?

I'll start with several secular textbooks that I have found useful. First of all is Susan Bassnett's excellent basic text, Translation Studies (4th ed.). This is the best basic textbook on secular translating in my humble but correct opinion (as my son says). It's not long (only 148 pp, plus an appendix), so it is an easy read. Basnett will give you great information on current issues, the history of translation theory, issues in literary translation, and the current theories. I use it as one of the textbooks in my grad class on Bible Translation Theory and Methods.

 

Another good basic book by a secular author is Key Terms in Translation Studies, by Giuseppe Palumbo. This is a very helpful book, and pretty recent (2009). If you want to know the trends and research and development going on in the world of secular translation, this would be an excellent book for you to read. Plus, I really like Palumbo's writing.

Caveat--The title makes it seem like it is a dictionary of translation, but it is not. If you want that kind of book, go with Dictionary of Translation Studies, by Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowrie. This book gives not just short definitions, but explanations of many of the terms, and is very helpful.

 

Good addition to the thread. Thanks!

I like that it even explains discourse analysis and translation theory.

 

Anthony Pym has an excellent book, Exploring Translation Theories (2010). This book is recent enough it makes an excellent guide to modern secular translation theories. It would be a good supplementary textbook. He discusses skopos theory, Venuti's works, polysystem theory, dynamic/functional equivalence, linguists and translators of the past such as Wittgenstein, Whorf, Sapir, even Jerome (the Vulgate translator), etc.

The problem with the discussion in the Bible translation world is that with few exceptions, most writers on Bible translation never explore the secular theories. Yet the secular theories all got their start with Eugene Nida's dynamic equivalence. IMO, you cannot be truly versed in Bible translation theory without knowing what is going on among Nida's theoretical descendents.

 

A book similar to Pym's is Contemporary Translation Theories, rev. 2nd ed, by Edwin Gentzler. This is another excellent book by another well known secular scholar. It does have a chapter on Eugene Nida and how he got part of his dynamic equivalence theory from Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar. This chapter is helpful to the theorist; the simple Bible translator must work and study to figure it out.

Gentzler does not like Nida. Here is a quote from pp. 53-54 in his book:
“The translated text, according to Nida, should produce a response in a reader in today’s culture that is ‘essentially like’ the response of the ‘original’ receptors; if it does not, he suggests making changes in the text (Gentzler’s emphasis) in order to solicit that initial response (Nida & Taber, 1969: 202).”

 

As an outside reader or the students, Lawrence Venuti, a noted translation studies scholar, has put together an excellent resource in the book he edited, The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. this is over 500 pages of articles and essays by old timers like Jerome, Dryden, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche. (Surprisingly, many philosophers have written about translation. He has chapters by several men in the 1940's and 1950's. He then has some chapters by authors in the 1960's & 1970',s, including Eugene Nida, Katharina Reiss (skopos theory originator), then essays by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury on polysystem theory).

More recent decades are included also, and this is one of the few places you can find essays on such things as translating movie titles, or Jacques Derrida' postmodern deconstructionist theory. Lawrence Venuti, my favorite secular translation studies author, also has an essay, "translation, Community, Utopia." All in all, this is an excellent volume for outside reading for a class on translation studies.

 

Another possible book for outside reading in a translation class is Similarity and Difference in Translation, ed. by Stefano Arduini and Robert Hodgson Jr. I was given this book recently and haven't had time to read it yet, but it is a book of essays put out by The Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society.

Now normally I would be very suspicious of anything put out by the ABS. However, this one has some essays by top flight scholars that I admire, so I know I'm going to get some good of it. For example, there is an essay by Ernst-August Gutt of relevance theory fame. This theory is replacing code theory in the minds of Bible translation scholars. There is an essay by Christiane Nord, of skopos theory fame. I have corresponded with her, and she is both gracious and brilliant. There is an essay by Ernst Wendland, perhaps the most prolific author on Bible translation today. He kindly came to our school last year and had a wonderful conversation with us three who teach Bible translation here.

Other articles that look fascinating include one on Chinese and English metaphors by Zaixi Tan, and another on translating the literary forms of Ps. 119, with the great title of "Read my Lipograms."

 

Only if you want to be an existential translator instead of an evangelical translator.

 

They've been modified, but yes they certainly are.

 

So, Eugene Nida wrote or cowrote three books that might have been used as textbooks, though he wrote a couple of informative books before that. The first one taught his dynamic equivalence theory, and it burst on the world of Bible translation with great effect. It was Toward a Science of Translating (1964). His intention was to put translation on a scientific basis by using the science of linguistics to teach it, notably code theory and Noam Chomsky's generative (also called transformational) grammar. While code theory is largely being replaced by relevance theory, transformational grammar is helpful to translators.

As I wrote, Nida was an existentialist, neo-orthodox in theology. This appears in his writings as reader response. In this theory, what is more important than authorial intent is the way the reader receives the translated message--thus, "reader response." I could not disagree more. God's intent as the divine Author of Scripture is far more important than how the reader responds.

 

Nida's second book on his theory was The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969), written with Charles R. Taber. In this book he refines the theory. This may be his book most suitable for a textbook, though of course it is long out of print as the first one is. It has a nice glossary, and a useful appendix on "Organization of Translation Projects."

His third book that might be used as a textbook is From One Language to Another (1986), with Jan De Waard. In this book he renames the theory "functional equivalence" since some had been using the term "dynamic equivalence" wrongly, in Nida' s opinion. For example, some had called The Living Bible "dynamic equivalence," and that offended Nida. The LB is not at all a DE translation.

I suppose that all three of these books were used at some time or another as textbooks. I'm sure the the Summer Institute of Linguistics used them. However, they have been replaced as textbooks notably by books by Mildred Larson and Katharine Barnwell. (More about these later.)

 

I suppose you could say that.

 

Thanks. Actually, it's a Judo/Jujutsu outfit with a black belt. I hold a brown belt in Judo and am cross-ranked 2nd black in a modern Jujutsu style, and 2nd black in karate, as well as my kung fu ranks. Never did train in tae kwan do.

The patches are for Ishiryoku Jujutsu, the Australian Jujutsu Federation, and the Gospel Martial Arts Union.

 

For you who are interested in translating from the Hebrew, there are few useful books on that subject. However, my son (our Hebrew prof) discovered a great one, which I am now reading. The Art of Bible Translation is a new book (2019) by Robert Alter. He is professor of the grad school at the U. of California, Berkeley, so is a major Hebrew scholar. He has done his own translation of the OT to high acclaim, so he is worth reading.

Oddly enough to the propounder of dynamic equivalence, he favors a more literal method as bringing out the literary qualities of the original. He believes that most (if not all) modern translations have missed the beauty of the OT as Hebrew literature by their efforts to clarify literary elements of the OT, speaking of "the woeful inadequacies of the twentieth-century English translations" when compared with the KJV as literature (p. 2). He writes, "The Bible itself does not generally exhibit the clarity to which its modern translators aspire: the Hebrew writers reveled in the proliferation of meanings, the cultivation of ambiguities, the playing of one sense of a term against another, and this richness is erased in the deceptive antiseptic clarity of the modern versions" (p. 10).