Featured Definitions Again

IMO, yes, but you are once more getting away from the OP, which is about definitions. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

 

I don't like the term "formal equivalence," which was invented by Nida and refers to the grammatical form as being more emphasized than the meaning.

Again, here is the condescending quote from Nida I posted in Post #22:

“formal correspondence: quality of a translation in which the features of the form of the source text have been mechanically reproduced in the receptor language. Typically, formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labor unduly hard.”
Eugene Nida and Charles Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation, p. 201.

 

They don't mean the same thing.

 

Yeah, a lot of profs mix the terms up. They follow Nida's terminology without knowing what he meant.

 

Both of those are Nida terms. "Thought for thought" and "word for word" are the old terms, going back many hundreds of years. Translators also used the terms "literal" and "free." Anyone who only says "formal" and "dynamic" or "functional equivalent" has surrendered to Nida.

Secular translation scholars almost never use these terms except when talking about Nida's theories, unless they are disciples of Nida, and there are very few of those in secular translation. I have a dozen or more books by secular scholars, and none of them--not a single one--uses Nida's terminology except when discussing Nida's theory.

 

And that is surprising to me. I didn't have to do a whole lot of reading of Nida to figure out what his terms meant. The truth is, most who comment on DE only read one or two of his books and think they've got it. (How many Nida books have you read?) The ones who read extensively are his disciples, like Mildred Larson, who has 18 of his works in the bibliography of Meaning-Based Translation.

 

Yes, I do concentrate on Nida and his followers. I don't see how anyone can intelligently critique someone's theories if they have not even read them. Have you read anything of Nida? I also read a lot of secular authors on translation, which I feel is important to reach a professional level.

I've read many other scholars on Bible translation. I cringe every time I read one of them using Nida's terminology for work not following Nida's theories.

I have seen that Bibles International uses Nida's terms, but not that James Price does.His book A Theory for Bible Translation uses "target," not "receptor." Care to share where Price uses Nida's terms when not discussing DE?

 

I'm surprised now by this, and I've been surprised before. I'm still surprised. Don't know what your point is other than to hassle me.

He uses them when writing about Nida's theories.

Okey dokey.

 

A rare term here on the BB is "back translation." Here is my definition:

back translation: a literal retranslation from the document in the target language back to the source language, usually for the purpose of checking the TL translation. This technique is common in tribal translation work, especially when a translation consultant is being used.

Notice that a back translation must be literal to be helpful. Even Eugene Nida, the inventor of dynamic equivalence, did literal back translations. Imagine that! “Dr. Nida instructed Viv to translate the first two chapters—the hardest chapters in Luke—from Tboli back into English, word for word. When they finished checking these, verse after verse, question after question, Dr. Nida turned to Vivian and said, ‘Young lady, you’ve done a splendid job.’”
Doris Fell, Lady of the Tboli (Chappaqua, NY: Christian Herald Books, 1979), 97.

I never thought much about this subject until we sent off an MA student to Africa for an internship. He had already taken my classes, but I had not discussed the back translation at all. We did not need it for our translation into Japanese. So I did some research and put together a lecture, the notes of which I sent to him in Africa. (Email is a huge boon to translation work!" He wrote back that it had been very helpful, and the African committee was encourage to get an outside reader as a back translator who was not connected with their effort.

John of Japan, still learning!

 

Both DE and Optimal Equivalence use a linguistic tool known as transformational grammar, pupularized by linguist Noam Chomsky as generative grammar. Here is a brief definition of my own:

Transformational grammar: A linguistic theory of grammar used in various translation methods which emphasizes the way meaning is expressed by relating various “transformations” that can be done to an original, “kernel” sentence. Example: for the kernel sentence “I drive,” one can have a negative transformation (I don’t drive), a passive transformation (I am driven), an interrogative transformation (Do I drive?), etc.

 

Here is my definition of "compute translation."

computer translation: using computer software to produce a translation. This method shows promise, but is still in its infancy. Even the best software cannot yet mimic a translator’s knowledge of syntax in the SL and TL, his intuition and his ability to do transformations in the two languages.

Eugene Nida was prescient, with the last chapter of his book, Toward a Science of Translating, being "Machine Translation," as it was called then.

 

MIldred Larson was a brilliant translator who had done a tribal translation in Peru, and her story of that effort is very interesting, reasure in Clay Pots. She wrote a book in 1998 with the title, Meaning-Based Translation. The subtitle is "A Guide to Cross-Language Equivalence." In many ways she is still the darling of the DE crowd. She updated Nida's theories in over 540 pages, and did a pretty good job. Here are a couple of quotes that briefly lay out her theory.

"Meaning-based translations make every effort to communicate the meaning of the source language text in the natural forms of the receptor language. Such translations are called idiomatic translations" (Mildred Larson, Meaning-Based Translation, 2nd ed., 17).

"Translation is much more than finding word equivalences. The source text structures must be abandoned for the natural receptor language structures without significant loss or change of meaning" (ibid, 207).