Featured "Formal" vs "Functional"

It doesn't boil down to merely two types of translational methodology.

 

Perhaps you can share what you mean by your terms so it can be determined if any translation is consistently and completely based on that type of translating.

Some seem to use "formal" to mean literally word-for-word when no translation is completely and consistently a word-for-word Bible translation.

 

I guess the OP doesn't know.

 

You take offence so easily Alex. If you don't know how to define the terms you asked about you can just say so.

 

The subject of your very own OP is far distant than your queer stuff.

 

Neither, because both are terms invented by Eugene Nida, who used the term "formal" to look down on literal methods.

One author wrote, “The label ‘formal equivalence’ is often used by defenders of dynamic equivalence theory, perhaps in part because this makes it so easy to caricature and thus dismiss essentially literal translation theory as a theory that places too much emphasis on the order of words in the original language” (Wayne Grudem, Chapter One, "Are Only Some Words of Scripture Breathed Out By God?" in Translating Truth, p. 10).

Nida himself wrote, "literalness: quality of a translation in which the form of the original is reproduced in the receptor language in such a way as to distort the message and/or the patterns of the receptor language” (Eugene Nida and Charles Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation, p. 203).

As for functional equivalence, it has been described by both secular and Christian scholars as leading to or becoming a form of paraphrase. So I disagree with it.

 

Depends on what I am using it for.

 

I prefer Formal Equivalence translations. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what the Holy Spirit wrote, not what someone thinks He might have meant.

 

Most translations are team efforts --not the work of a solitary individual. And translating the meaning is not a cavalier project by any means.

 

My old Hebrew prof, Dr. James Price, coined the term "optimal equivalence," which I like. He delineated his method in two books, Complete Equivalence in Bible Translation (1987; the editor would not let him use "Optimal") and A Theory for Bible Translation: An Optimal Equivalence Model (2007). Don't get the latter book unless you know Hebrew!

Scholars (and wannabes) of the functional persuasion love to denigrate the terms "literal" and "word for word," and they never define the terms, so I only use those terms with students and friends or when I want to be looked down on.

Here is Price's definition of optimal equivalence: "Optimal Equivalence—a theory of translation that focuses on the equivalence of words, kernel clauses, transformations, and literary form” (Optimal Equivalence, p. 336). The bolded terms refer to the linguistic theory of transformational grammar as used by Price.

 

Maximum Lexical Transfer.

Exact Equivalence.

Direct Correspondence.

Infinite Translational Authority.

I could come up with a few more.

In the end it's just meaning-for-meaning. There is no Optimal Equivalence Injection device to plug in that would distinguish it from other marketing slogans.

 

And just as expected, Rippon denigrates the method. His opinion (wherever he got it) would have more weight with me if he knew another language, knew the Greek and/or Hebrew, and had ever done translation.

James Price is a widely known Hebrew scholar. He's not perfect, but is far, far more qualified to name a translation method than Rippon.

 

The principles of Optimal Equivalence:

1. “Seeks to preserve all of the information in the text, while presenting it in good literary form.”[1]
2. “Optimal equivalence as a translation philosophy recognizes that form cannot be neatly separated from meaning and should not be changed...unless comprehension demands it.”[2]
3. “The primary goal of translation is to convey the sense of the original with as much clarity as the original text and the translation language permit.”[3]
4. “Optimal equivalence appreciates the goals of formal equivalence but also recognizes its limits.”[4]
5. OE seeks to preserve ambiguities that were in the original.

​

[1] Preface, New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), v.
[2] Holman Christian Standard Bible, “Foreword” (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009), v.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

 

What about the marketing slogan of "Complete Equivalence" which is not a term I made up?

 

What constitutes "good literary form? Understandable? Poetic? ESV-type "literary eloquence"?

Is it possible to preserve all the information in the text? There is no trade-off? Because in translation by experts they acknowledge that it is impossible to preserve everything. It's a give and take proposition.

The Preface of the ESV claims that its translational methodology "seeks to carry over evry nuance of meaning" from the original text. Do you actually think that is possible in ANY translation?