Understanding Nida

This forms 'part 3' of my short series on Nida. (Parts 1 and 2 mention a few misunderstandings.)

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 ...

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]

(So "translation from English nowadays into any other tongue" is an example of 'translating down'.)

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.)

Translation Studies and Nida

Last year my reading in Translation Studies was minimal. I did manage to read through Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader (2nd edition).

Among the many topics of interest covered there, I remember being struck by how different the chapter was by Eugene Nida in comparison to my previous understanding of his translation theory.

Like many, I had presumed a distorted view of Nida's approach of 'dynamic' (then later 'functional') 'equivalence'. But reading a 1964 extract (from Toward a Science of Translating) in a chronologically-based reader gave me a new appreciation for Nida's approach to the discussion (and goal of others) at that time for formulating theories of equivalence. And I noticed the absence of overly simplistic polarities that I had earlier presumed to be there. So for example:

Between the two poles of translating (i.e. between strict formal equivalence and complete dynamic equivalence) there are a number of intervening grades, representing various acceptable standards of literary translating.

Also (among other examples) his acknowledgment that a translator must 

contend with the special difficulties resulting from such an effective exploitation of the total resources of the source language

demonstrates that Nida's approach was not overly simplistic as is often presumed.

I was recently pleased to discover a paper by Ernst Wendland and Stephen Pattemore, “The Dynamic Equivalence Caper”—A Response (OTE 26 2013): 471-490, as 

"This article overviews and responds to Roland Boer’s recent wide ranging critique of Eugene A Nida’s theory and practice of “dynamic equivalence” in Bible translating. Boer’s narrowly focused, rather insufficiently-researched evaluation of Nida’s work suffers from both a lack of historical perspective and a current awareness of what many, more recent translation scholars and practitioners have been writing for the past several decades. Our rejoinder discusses some of the major misperceptions and misleading assertions that appear sequentially in the various sections of Boer’s article with the aim of setting the record straight, or at least of framing the assessment of modern Bible translation endeavors and goals in a more positive and accurate light."

The article is readily available online, including Wendland's academia page, which shows evidence that Bible Translation Studies is more alive than I first bemoaned. That the discipline has already been so named (BTS) is good news. The article has lead me today, indirectly, to discover the Nida School of Translation Studies (NSTS) which

was launched as an initiative of the Nida Institute in 2007, following several years of active involvement with the well-known CETRA program. Designed with the goal of putting into practice a transdisciplinary approach to translation theory and practice, as well as that of incorporating sacred text translation more fully into the world of modern translation studies, the Nida School meets for two weeks annually at its campus in Misano Adriatico (Rimini), Italy.

I am thrilled to discover this. Also there is a journal associated with it: Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, which has published four issues so far.
 
Over the Christmas-New Year period I finished reading David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books: 2011).

Bellos includes a chapter featuring a bit on Nida, which I found illuminating and will mention in my next post.