Someone who doesn't know the history of this subject on the BB may be wondering what the big deal is about the term "receptor," and why I do not use it. First of all, my linguistic/translation training was secular (Tokyo School of the Japanese Language), and secular translators don't use the term, but use "target" instead.
Secondly, Nida's term "receptor" was based in his existentialism, which becomes neo-orthodoxy in theology. All conservative theologians oppose neo-orthodoxy, and all good Christians oppose the godless philosophy of existentialism. Nida's idea was that how the "receiver" of the translation reacts (called "reader response") is the most important fact of a translation.
That the term "receptor" is based in Nida's existentialism is easily proven. Here is just one quote. Nida’s friend and hagiographer Philip Stine wrote, “Nida drew on the existentialist philosophers, particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein, who held that the meaning of any word is a matter of what we do with our language” (Philip Stine, Philip C. Stine, Let the Words be Written (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004, 143).
Nida himself wrote in detail how existentialism was a theoretical basis for his theory in his first work on DE: "Those who espouse the traditional, orthodox view of inspiration quite naturally focus attention on the presumed readings of the 'autographs.' The result is that, directly or indirectly, they often tend to favor quite close, literal renderings as the best way of preserving the inspiration of the writer by the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, those who hold the neo-orthodox view, or who have been influenced by it, tend to be freer in their translating; as they see it, since the original document inspired its readers because it spoke meaningfully to them, only an equally meaningful translation can have this same power to inspire present-day receptors" (Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translating,. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1964, 47-48).