Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Nida’s insistence on adaptive translation can be understood in two ways. First, it follows from the beliefs he shares with other Christians that a religious truth must be accessible to all humans, whatever their culture and language. Equally important, however, is Nida’s wish to respect the cultures that Bible translators inevitably affect and alter by their work. Adaptive translation is a compromise between these two contradictory aspirations. It helps the receiving culture accept and integrate something completely new by using terms that are already familiar.

Nida’s position is not popular among translation-studies scholars, particularly those mainly concerned with the translation of literary works. They might point out how preposterous it would be in the translation of an oral epic from an African language into English to replace banyan with chestnut on the grounds that banyan trees are nowhere to be seen in England’s green and pleasant land. Such attacks miss the main point, which is this: translating UP doesn’t normally use the same techniques as translating DOWN. There’s no good reason to think that a single undifferentiated set of practices or principles should or ever will hold sway over the whole vast field of translation. The hierarchical relationship between source and target isn’t the sole determinant of the methods that translators may use, but it affects quite fundamentally what they do and how they do it.

Cultural substitution, for example, can at times be used in translating UP, but to different effect. Arthur Waley’s influential translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry and prose give us English-sounding “Lords” and “Ladies” in place of altogether different social ranks in the ancient societies of the Far East. Waley’s reasons for making these substitutions are as complicated as Nida’s approval of cockatoo in place of snow. On the one hand, “Lords” and “Ladies” protects English-language readers from having to acquire too much arcane information about a culture they don’t especially wish to learn about. On the other hand, the use of domestic markers of high status reinvests the foreign society represented with recognizable signals of prestige, and thus makes it worth learning about. Translators’ strategic decisions are always two-edged swords.

The technique that seems furthest removed from cultural substitution is the intentional alteration of the target language. Bible translation once again provides us with some extreme examples. In the twentieth century, several scholarly Bible retranslation projects have sought to restore the foreignness of the scriptures for readers already familiar with them in more adaptive forms. The Context Group of the Society of Biblical Literature, for example, argues that “the Bible is not a Western Book” and that it was “not written for us.”[107] Members of the group point out that because language cannot be isolated from the social context in which it is embedded, and because the ancient Middle East is a completely alien land, the Hebrew Bible cannot be fully represented in a translation that makes ordinary sense today.[108] Their program of defamiliarizing biblical texts follows in the footsteps of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Jewish theologians who retranslated the Old Testament into German in the 1920s so as to restore what they saw as the poetic, religious, and communal characteristics of their faith as it was in the beginning.[109] To achieve this, they reproduce the word repetitions and patterns of sound found in the Hebrew at the expense of easy legibility. Thus, where Exodus 3:14–15 in a barely updated version of the King James translation of 1611 is fairly accessible—

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations

—the Buber-Rosenzweig translation, which respects the line breaks of the Hebrew, as well as many other features of that ancient tongue, would sound something like this if it were put into English in like manner: