Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Nida never translated the Bible himself. He worked as linguistic consultant to the United Bible Societies, helping to exercise quality control over a great number of Bible translation projects that arose after the Second World War. In that capacity, he lectured all over the world and sought to explain in layman’s terms some of the contentious issues of language and culture that have been tackled from a different perspective in chapters of this book.

Nida made a distinction between two kinds of equivalence in translation: formal equivalence, where the order of words and their standard or common meanings correspond closely to the syntax and vocabulary of the source; and dynamic equivalence (later renamed functional equivalence), where the translator substitutes for source-text expressions other ways of saying things with roughly the same force in the culture of the receiving society. He was an unashamed proponent of the view that, as far as the Bible was concerned, only dynamic equivalence would do. In that sense he was renewing the translator’s defense of the right to be free and not “literal.” Nida’s overriding concern, which is also that of the United Bible Societies, is that the holy scriptures be brought to all people—and that what is brought to them be the scriptures, as nearly as can be managed. A Bible that makes no immediate sense in the target language, or Bibles that can be read or understood only by trained theologians or priests, are not well suited to missionaries’ aims. Nida’s preference for dynamic equivalence was in the first place an encouragement to translators to sacrifice whatever was necessary to “get the message across.” As he titled one of the chapters of the handbook he co-authored with Jan de Waard: “Translating Means Translating Meaning.”[103]

As explained see here, this approach is characteristic of translating UP. Yet the source languages of the scriptures—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—are still, without doubt, and especially for adherents to the faith, much nearer the essence of the texts’ religious meaning than any of the vernacular translations they could turn out. Seen in this light, twentieth-century Bible translation ought to be the largest case study we have of translating DOWN—translating from a language of prestige to a local idiom, from a “general language of truth” to a specific vernacular. However, the majority of Bible translations that Nida oversaw were not from Greek or Latin (and Hebrew even less) but from the American versions of the Bible in English, and from two influential Spanish versions, the Reina-Valera of 1909 and a simplified text called Dios Habla Hoy (“God Speaks Today”).[104] These are, of course, the “general languages” or “dominant idioms” in many parts of the world nowadays.

Retranslation (translating a text that is already a translation) is not a modern departure for the Bible. Only the Aramaic targums and the Greek Septuagint were translated directly from biblical Hebrew. The Armenian, Coptic, Old Latin, Syriac, Ge’ez, Persian, and Arabic translations of the Old Testament were done from the Greek; the Georgian Bible was probably first translated from Armenian (though it may have also used the Syriac and the Greek); the Old Gothic likewise, probably with some reference to Latin versions. Jerome used Hebrew and Aramaic texts to complement the Septuagint for his long-influential version of the Old Testament in Latin, and the original Greek for the New Testament. Early German translations of the Bible in the fifteenth century were done from Jerome’s Latin, as were the first Bibles in Swedish. Martin Luther was the first among European translators to use Greek and Hebrew as source texts; his German formulations were, however, copied by many translators into other European languages, who sometimes used Luther’s version as their sole source (the Icelandic Bible is a case in point). The Bible was not translated into French until the sixteenth century—from Latin and Italian, not from Hebrew or Greek. The first complete English Bible, by Miles Coverdale, also had no contact with the original languages but drew on Jerome’s Latin, a later Latin translation by Erasmus, and Luther’s German. The use of modern European translations to retranslate the scriptures into nearly two thousand mostly non-European tongues in the last hundred years is therefore no innovation in the long history of these texts, but it raises issues of great magnitude. It confirms and drives the perception of English and Spanish, not of Hebrew or Greek, as “languages of truth”; their status as the source for Bible translation is hard to separate from the political, economic, and cultural status of the speakers of these two vehicular tongues.