The first thing worth understanding about Nida is that he advocated an approach towards translation as though 'translating up' rather than the usual approach of 'translating down'. Translating 'up' and translating 'down' are Bellos's terms for talking about the asymmetrical relationships between source and target languages:
Translation UP is towards a language of greater prestige than the source ... [or] towards a language with a larger readership ... [or] it may also simply be the language of the conquerors, or of a people with greater economic power ...(So "translation from English nowadays into any other tongue" is an example of 'translating down'.)
Translation DOWN is towards a vernacular with a smaller audience than the source, or towards one with less cultural, economic or religious prestige, or one not used as a vehicular tongue. [David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (Penguin, 2011), 172]
Traditionally, translating 'down' has been one way in which a smaller vernacular language is enriched by means of a larger dominant one. Normally translating towards the more prestigious language ('UP') erases traces of the texts foreign origin "whereas translation DOWN tend to leave a visible residue of the source, because in those circumstances foreigness itself carries prestige." [Bellos, Is That a Fish, 173]
Nida, however, favored the approach which was "characteristic of translating up". Effectively Nida's approach treated the target language with the respect traditionally assumed for more prestigious languages.
There is something gracious in this assumption...Scripture (and God) speaks in the vernacular - shrinking the distance between text and message. Nida did not want to risk 'enriching' the vernacular languages (with biblical language) in order to prevent misunderstanding of Scriptural meaning.
But ultimately I find this approach quite patronizing. I cannot help feeling that despite Nida's intentions, the target language (and culture) not only misses out in this approach but it is also belittled by assuming that readers cannot be trusted to judge for themselves what to make of an ancient group of texts that speaks about things from a foreign culture in a foreign idiom. By 'unmaking' the foreign one inevitably oversimplifies and underestimates the benefit of grappling with complexities and realities unfamiliar yet ultimately necessary for sustaining healthy critique of societal issues past and present.
(That's only two points on understanding Nida, not three as originally promised.)
