Part 4, Dynamic UnEquivalence: Nida v. Jin (and Gayle)

Somebody at the Better Bibles Blog called Eugene Nida a “translation statesman.” It was Wayne Leman.

(And I thought to myself, “Cicero, the statesman of translation.”)

Wayne later just as publicly accused me of caricaturing Nida. Wayne made what he claimed was a “safe” assumption that I had not read Nida or Nida disciples very widely or deeply. His evidence for his rather flimsy claim was the fact that I had quoted early Nida (because nobody else had quoted Nida in his very own words); I used direct quotations and had applied these statements by this "statesman" to actual examples of Bible translation that others in the comment thread were bringing in. And Wayne went even further, to say, to me, not to you, rather pointedly, directly, and even repeatedly: “I would, again, refer you to the actual writings of the Bible societies people, people trained by Nida, to find out that they are concerned with the very things you are concerned about, but which you claim DE people are not.” And so Wayne directed me, not you, to some books, as if this would help me get them and read them faster, presuming, by his claim, that I have not already read very deeply or widely the disciples of Nida who have moved on from their teacher; Wayne linked to the first-published jointly-authored book by Lynell Zogbo and Ernst Wendland and two other books by Wendland.

(And I thought to myself, “I wonder why didn’t Wayne mention and link to Zogbo’s and Wendland’s more recent book, Prophetic Rhetoric: Case Studies in Text Analysis and Translation.”)

[Please do note, dear reader, the comments below here, the on-going exchange between Wayne Leman and me.  He's wanting you not to see my comments here about him, in this post here above the comments, to be the first ones you read.  And, agreeing with him, I'd actually advise you to go back to the BBB comment thread to read it for yourself if you are interested in how different it might be from how I've framed here in my post what he wrote at the BBB.  In fairness to Wayne, he's continued to appeal to me, saying, "Again, I would encourage you to revise your first comments about me in your post, especially since they are the first things people read in your post. And you know how important the first and last things are for readers in terms of memory retention of the contexts of something they have read."  This is Wayne's caution to you, my dear reader.  Please read as you will, critically if you can.]

The conversation at BBB is winding down. Wendland has contributed frequently, constantly pressing everybody to move on beyond Nida. More than that, Wenland has made two recent comments in which he even “steers” BBB readers away from his “own stuff” – his publications, even the two with Zogbo, that move on from Nida – and Wendland goes on to “recommend just five older, (I would say) classic works, for starters.” He recommends three books by Robert Alter, including his Literary Guide to the Bible with Frank Kermode, and two books by Leland Ryken, including his Complete Literary Guide to the Bible with Tremper Longman III. Then Wenland agrees with Wayne on one final point, finally saying the following: “[M]uch more interdisciplinary work is necessary in the field of Bible translation. Intra-disciplinary as well, I would say—that is, interacting with the field of secular translation studies.” He urges BBB readers to go to the SIL center in Dallas next month for “Bible Translation 2011” after he’s made this final, parting comment: “Secular translators need to keep up with what’s going on in the theory and practice of Bible translation—and not remain with their eyes fixed, for good or ill, on Nida and his works.”

(And I thought to myself, “Eugene Nida only died 10 days ago.”)

This is now my fourth post in a series of four on Nida. Wendland’s final comment, dividing “secular” translators from “Bible” translators got me wondering how he’d classify Eunice Pike and Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo and Willis Barnstone.

(And I thought to myself, the following:

I wonder how Jin Di would find himself classified by Ernst Wendland. Have the two ever met? What they have in common – regardless of some strict middle-exclusionary divisive “secular” v. “Bible” translation categorization made by Wendland in a parting comment at BBB – is that both Jin and Wendland have met Nida and want to move on. Wenland wants to move on with Bible translation, now with a more literary focus.  Jin wants to move on with secular translation and with Bible translation but with a notable difference from Nida.

Jin, of course, is perhaps best known in the USA for his translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses into Chinese. But I think he wants me, and you too, to know that he’s moved on from Nida.

In 1984, Jin and Nida co-wrote the book, On Translation: with Special Reference to Chinese and English. And then in 2006, Jin annotated and republished their entire book as Part 1. In the same 2006 volume, he added his own Part 2, several of his own essays, to explain just how far from Nida he then was.

Jin describes the difficult parting between himself and Nida. He’d disagreed with Nida over his famous and repeated appraisal of the J.B. Phillips’s translation as exemplary DE translation, a sort of watershed in the progress of Bible translation, as evidenced by Nida’s most-oft quoted example, the line: “give one another a hearty handshake all around” as opposed to the more literal “greet one another with a holy kiss.” Jin began to appeal to what works better for “a literary piece as a work of art” and began to question Nida’s linguistics as serving purposes for merely “religious translation” [see page 211 of the 2006 edition.]

In the Appendix for On Translation: An Expanded Edition, Jin publishes and comments on an interview he’d granted to John Kearnes. One section of the interview transcript is entitled, “Translation Theory and Eugene Nida.” There, Kearnes asks Jin if he would comment particularly on his work with Nida, particularly on their book, On Translation: with Special Reference to Chinese and English. Jin replies:

Sure, that was a really important link in my work on translation theory. You must have noticed that my relationship with Dr. Nida, mainly in regard to my theoretical approach to translation, was a main theme for the talk, “Literature and Exoticism” that I gave at the ceremony two days ago. . . Because of my three decades of experience in translating, I had been asked to serve at my university as a translation consultant for a group translation project and to work as a translation teacher at its new graduate school. . . . and toward the end of those 1970s I was writing first drafts of what eventually evolved into On Translation. I was giving lectures based on those drafts, and an American professor by the name of Tom Scovel found, when he attended one of my lectures, that my views were very close to Dr. Nida’s. Professor Scovel was not translator or translation theorist and did not know Dr. Nida personally but, being a warm-hearted Christian, he got in touch with Nida’s American Bible Society and helped make arrangements which enabled me to meet Dr. Nida in the U.S. in 1982. . . [D]uring the year, and for each chapter of the book I traveled to Greenwich, Connecticut where, in Dr. and Mrs. Nida’s very hospitable house, he and I discussed my draft and brought it into shape.

The discussions were very thoroughgoing. . . . I was and am still extremely grateful to him for the time and energy he generously put into this close collaboration, and in particular for the theoretical orientation based on the concept of equivalent effect that he had treated in his books . . . .

I believe On Translation, published in 1984, was and remains a sound exposition of the principles of translation and has been particularly useful for translation practitioners and students with the examples it provides. In the mid-1908s I began to deviate from Nida’s teachings in one particular aspect of the concept of dynamic equivalence, as I explained in my talk “Literature and Exoticism.” I don’t think we have time to go into that in this interview, but . . . in 1987 I sent Dr. Nida a copy of my typescript of the very first article I wrote which indicated that deviation. Obviously he did not like it, for he never replied to my letter . . . . [pages 304 – 305].

That Nida never replied to Jin was most difficult. Neither man was trying to reconcile the difference in their [Bible] translation theory. Jin’s theory departed from Nida’s. But, more importantly, Nida left Jin in silence.)

Nida has left all of us and is now silent. Like Cicero, the translation statesman, he’s left us with a theory perhaps dynamically equivalent to that of the Roman rhetorician. As we all know, Nida loved to quote, and even at times misquoted, Cicero. We have their words.

(And I thought to myself, I’m not so sure we all need to rush to leave Nida behind. I’m not talking about embracing his theory now that he’sgone.

But I’m not talking about going with his project full force either. It’s the missionary ethnocentricism that is embedded in Western logic, yes even Aristotle’s and Cicero’s who were not Christians but were missionaries for their own causes, that those who would abandon Nida now still embrace. What I’m talking about is the arrogance of presuming one’s own cultural and tradition is normative for everybody else.

Let me just say again what I’m finding about translation. I’m saying this again as an evangelical Christian missionary’s kid still growing up as a third-cultural kid. I’m saying this as somebody who continues to talk with SIL/ Wycliffe Bible translators after having done lots of reading and having completed a Master’s oF arts degree in Linguistics, which involved many lectures and articles and books by Bible translators, some secular translators too, including Nida. I’m saying this as someone who will try to make it over to Dallas to SIL for their Bible translation conference next month, because a BBB contributor, David Frank, is giving a paper there and as invited me to hear his talk. I’m saying this as somebody who applies his linguistics training to higher education work every single work day of the year. I’m saying this as someone who has a ph.d. in language, in rhetorics and in Aristotle’s Rhetoric of Athens and now of the West and in its reception and its translation.

What I’m finding is that Nida’s dynamic translation theory is too reductive. It’s complicit in what Nancy Mairs sees as the “fundamental structure of the patriarchy”: the binary. Good translations do many different things. They engage, alternatively, in what Robert E. Quinn has called, in a far different academic context, the “telling strategy,” the “forcing strategy,” the “negotiating strategy,” and the “self transforming strategy.” Statesman Nida, I believe, engaged in the “forcing strategy.” That is, he forces receptors of Bible translations to stay in their own cultures and prevents them from engaging in the Other. This post is already going way too long to explicate this any further. [Elsewhere, there's another 4-part series on something like this that went on something like that:  part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]

I do want to acknowledge, nonetheless, that although Wayne has accused me of being ignorant of Nida and of his later disciples and of failing to read, he’s also apologized at BBB to me in a sense. I have no hard feelings. And I do want you to know that I believe that Wayne, despite his entrenched views on missionary Bible translation, is one who engages nonetheless in “self transformative strategies.”  And that is, in fact, a very very good thing.

Wayne, in comments at another BBB post, made these precious statements. In email, he has given me permission to repost them here:

"Similarly, I believe that Jesus set new patterns for treatment of women. He treated them with greater respect and honor than they were typically accorded in his day. We did not see abolition of slavery within Bible times nor specific calls from any biblical authors for slaves to be emancipated. Yet I believe that God has been pleased whenever emancipation has occurred, especially if it was done in a way that accorded dignity to freed slaves and helped them become financially independent.

Similarly, I don’t believe that God has been pleased when men have owned their wives. But God has tolerated inferior social systems rather than calling for changing everything within them all at once. I personally believe that a marriage model that focuses more on a woman’s submission to her husband than a husband’s duty to sacrificially love his wife is inferior and, yes, even unbiblical. I grew up in such a household. My mother had to submit to my father or else he would beat her. He beat her anyway when she did something that displeased him such as accidentally scorching potatoes when she was cooking them."

The only exception I take to Wayne's precious statement above is that I do not think that "Jesus set new patterns for treatment of women."  I strongly believe that Jewish women and men long before Jesus, who was a Jew and was not a Christian, were the ones who actually set the patterns for good treatment of women by men and by women.  Jesus, in fact, did recover them.  And that also is, in fact, a very very good thing.  Eugene Nida's DE theory and practice, I'm afraid, may have contributed to burying the good and the Jewish cultural patterns of good treatment of women.

Wayne did want me to let you know who he is by name. He said to quote him by name when I reproduced the quotations. And he added this:

“BTW, Kurk, since my father has died I now feel free to have my Al Johnson poems under my own name.
Wayne”

I’d told him I wanted to link to an older post where, also with Wayne’s permission, I reproduced one of his poems. Here it is:

http://speakeristic.blogspot.com/2010/04/until-its-safe-for-you.html.

I’m telling you all of this because I have a missionary evangelical Christian patriarch, my own father, who is in the final stages of what his doctors have told him is inoperable and incurable cancer.  He was, in some unfortunate respects, like Wayne's father.  In some fortunate turns for my father and for my mother and for all of us in my family, my father has rethought things and has made amends and has given much and has received much requested forgiveness.  There is restoration and reconcilation.  The translations are coming. The transformations and self transformations are already happening.)

I hope I’ll remember Eugene Nida and his dynamic equivalence theory for the rest of my life. Not because I believe in his missionary project. I do not. But because he’s contributed to our thinking and practices of translation, secular and Bible, theory and work that we who are still alive may and do need to continue to study. When we stop changing, when we quit remembering, when we cease from learning, we die.

pt 3, Dynamic unEquivalence: Nida v. Barnstone

This is part 3 of a series. In part 1, we considered how Eugene Nida’s reductive theory of dynamic equivalence opposed Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice of translating. In part 2, we looked at how Nida’s simplistic focus on language as mere communication excludes culture and Jewishness in the Bible and how it takes people like Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo to point out his ethnocentrism and to recover and to give us some recovery from it. In part 3, let’s review Nida’s binary and then let Willis Barnstone propose how to bust that up.

To be sure, Barnstone’s theory of language is as robust as Pike’s. Moreover, his work in translation is informed by his theory and is incredibly prolific. And, certainly, Barnstone’s knowledge of Bible translation is equal to Seidman’s and to Zogbo’s. He’s a well-researched scholar, a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation in general and of Bible translation in particular. I think he knows the anti-Semitic tendencies of much Christian Bible translation, and just a read of his essay, “How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew,” gives evidence. All that to say, I don’t want us to pigeonhole Pike or Seidman or Zogbo or Barnstone as specialists with tunnel vision whose particular and individual and singular respective view only offers just one of several needed vantages from which to take down Nida’s dynamic equivalence theory.

Nor do I want to box in Nida. Nor do I desire for anyone to do that. I do want to notice the problems his reductive theory has caused. I do want you to see he’s caused issues for others and how they must deal with these. So here’s Barnstone.

Barnstone’s issues with Nida include two that I’d like to highlight here. The first is that Nida’s linguistics operates on the binary principle of a sort of reductive “linguistics v. literature,” and especially literature that is part and parcel of cultural patterns and the arts. The second issue is that Nida’s “form v. message” message is an unnecessarily simplistic binary.

First, Barnstone seems to be very generous to Nida. Here’s an excerpt from Barnstone’s book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (page 224):

Returning to mainstream linguistics and literature, the joining of what might be considered science and art has not been “a happy alliance,” to use the words of Henry G. Schogt in his recent book Linguisitics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation. I do not wish to denigrate the work of older pioneers in translation theory: Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Catford’s translation shifts and his application of Firth-Halliday linguistics to translation, Mounin’s linguistic techniques, which represent “un art fondé sur une science” (Problèmes théoriques 17), and the comparative discourse links expressed by the team of Jean-Paul Vinay and the late Jean Darbelnet (the latter my esteemed teacher) are all purely linguistic without reference to literature. Even Nida’s primary purpose has been to spread the Christian faith through denotative translations favoring “content over connotative and associative elements . . . content over form, and . . . decoder-oriented” (Schogt, Linguistics 104). Because their intentions and practice belong to linguistic theory, not literary analysis, they should not be reproached for what is neither their domain nor their intent.

Don’t reproach Nida, Barnstone suggests. But then he goes on to talk about the problems of Nida’s separation of his would-be communication-science linguistics from literature. Barnstone writes:

Disturbing, however, is the frequent expectation that linguistics provides a model for literary translation analysis and theory. We can easily identify the source of the temptation – translation, after all, ordinarily involves a linguistic activity between languages. So why not turn to linguistics for the theoretical frame of literary translation? Because to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literary translation is no more nor less reasonable than to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literature. Linguistics has essentially forsworn literary, and specifically literary translation, theory. That is its privilege and apparently for the moment its fate. Although linguistics and philosophy have largely ignored literary translation, their own work, forbidding to the nonlinguist, unnecessarily casts a shadow over the serious value of nonlinguistic approaches. Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . . it would be welcome.

Okay. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a blog post. I’d urge you to read Barnstone’s books, to see the various things he develops along these lines with respect to Nida and his reductive non-literary theory of translation. (For that matter, I would encourage you to read more of Nida for yourself. I’ll say more in comments if anybody is interested in what I’d recommend.)

Barnstone gets to another problem with Dynamic Equivalence, when he translates the New Testament and writes commentary on it. In his commentary, Barnstone identifies three different registers for translation. Notice three in contrast to simply an EITHER / OR two. Nida posits the simple binary:

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."

Nida writes of "Two [and only two] Basic Orientations in Translating," in his book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, on pages 120-21:

EITHER [1] translation has an orientation towards “formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," which “might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.”

OR [2] there is, “[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message.”

Barnstone rejects this binary. He says there may well be:

[1] a gloss for the reader who wants help with the source text [i.e., an interlinear] and [2] imitation for the ['translating'] writer who wants to collaborate with, adapt, or rewrite a precursor's [originally-authored] work....

There is also [nevertheless] [3] a middle ground between [1] gloss and [2] imitation, whose purpose is to hear the source author more clearly than the translator author (page 1290 of The Restored New Testament, Barnstone’s translation).

With respect to the Bible, an example Barnstone gives of [1] “a gloss” is “[t]he Jesus Seminar translation of the gospels... heavy in explanation and conceptualization of image and metaphor, [that] uses key words to clarify rather than to express.” This is Nida’s so-called “formal or literal equivalence.”

An illustration of [2] “imitation,” according to Barnstone, is “John Dominic Crossan's adroit transformations of Yeshua's sayings into minimalist poems.” For Nida, this would be closer to his ideal of “dynamic or functional equivalence.”

Finally, Barnstone’s alternative to these two is the more exemplary [3] “middle ground” translation approach, the approach that he says “is Tyndale's... autonomous restatement” and is also what Robert Alter is doing “in making the literal literary” with his translating of the Hebrew Bible.

As Barnstone himself attempts making the literal literary in translation of the New Testament, he says, “This is the difficult middle way.” He calls his work [3] “an autonomous text to be read in English as scripture. . . .” (pages 1289-91).

Barnstone gets his idea for [3] “the literal literary” not first from Bible translators such as Tyndale and Alter but from a translator of Homer's Odyssey: from Robert Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald began to translate Homer, he first asked Ezra Pound, “How?” Pound replied, “Let Homer say everything he wanted to say.” This was the middle way between [1] glossing Homer's Greek and [2] imitating it.

There is not doubt that this advice was unusual for Pound. The translator was one who's “normal practice” was never [1] to gloss but was normally [2] to take “tremendous freedoms” as he “imitated, and intimately collaborated with or overcame the author in his best translations from Anglo-Saxon and Chinese.” Barnstone adds: “and they may be his own best poems” not necessarily giving any credit whatsoever to the original authors. Nonetheless, Pound advises Fitzgerald [3] to take the middle way between [1] literal glossing and [2] dynamic or functional equivalence license.

Barnstone explains this [3] “middle ground” approach as “both literal and literary.” We might use Nida’s terms and call it “both formal and functional” and “both literal and dynamic.” Barnstone says:

    The translator in service of the source author becomes more invisible as the art intensifies, permitting the reader [3] to see Homer or Dante or the Bible and, as Pound suggested, [3] to hear them have their say. By contrast, in the inevitable collaboration between author and translator, as we move from [1] re-creation to [2] imitation, the earlier author tends to disappear, overcome by the voice of the translating author. (page 1292).

Nida, to be clear, advocates [2] the dynamic or functional imitation of the text's effect on receptors. Thus, I'd like to end the post now with a contrastive illustration of Nida's approach and Barnstone's.

In his entry "Bible translation," for the first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida gives an example of a translation of his from the New Testament. He writes:

Since the relevance of a message is not in the formal features of a text but in its semantic content, some measure of freedom is required if the target audience is to understand the biblical text. The heavy weight of tradition, however, often stifles a translator's creativity and obstructs a reader's comprehension. For example, most English-speakers have no idea what Hallowed be thy name (the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6:9) really means. The Greek text can be translated literally [1] as 'Sanctified be thy name', in which 'name' is a Semitic way of avoiding a direct reference to God, and 'sanctified' must refer not to the character of God, but to the manner in which He is recognized by peole as being truly God. Accordingly, it is more relevantly rendered [2] as May all people realize that you are God or Help us to honour you as God or even as Help us to honour your name. (page 26)

Barnstone, in contrast, avoids either [1] literally translating or [2] telling readers what must really be meant by the Hebraic Hellene ultimately rendered "relevantly" in a non-Jewish but English "reader-comprehensible" sense.

By the way, the Jewish Matthew translates and writes the spoken Jewish words of the Jewish Jesus to his Jewish audience by this Jewish Greek:

ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομα σου·

Barnstone works, likewise, to Let Matthew let Jesus say everything that he wanted to say. They give voice to Yeshua ben Yosef. "Yet hear that voice and hear a poet." Barnstone lets Matthew, who is Mattityahu, say everything that he wanted to say. He gives voice to Mattityahu:

hallowed be your name.

A literary literal rendering of a Jewish prayer. So who's stifled whom and who's obstructed what?

Part 2, Dynamic Unequivalence: Nida v. Seidman and Zogbo

This is part 2 of a series now. Part 1 is here.

This part will be heavier, without photos of people. That's on purpose. The focus this time is neither on the reductive binary by which Eugene Nida constructs his theory of dynamic equivalence nor on Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice that deconstructs his not-“symbols”-but-“communication-code” notion. This part of the series will have no (A) pictures or would-be-male-only-whistle-talk or cloth-put-against-which-is-rubber or signs or fluff or structures or mis-leading formal forms but is rather, in Functional Style, (B) only on meaning behind those dangerous shadows of the wall, on that other-wise rhetorical effect on you now, here and now, in your own language and your own culture and your own history, and principally on the message now uncoded for you and put naturally -- as you might say it were I field tested your sense -- so that you don't have to ask questions or to remember somebody else or even to engage the Other. This message is Eugene Nida's. This is the focus of this part. Please be reassured that you need not be distracted by the actual literal words he said and wrote or even how he wrote it or its original context since this blog post has translated them dynamically functionally for you in your very own heart language. Call this the Good News Blog-post-part in the same tribe and family with the Good News Bible.

This second part steps back from Nida’s essential distinction between forms and communication to find him essentializing, putting the Other in a box, and engaging in Western Christian ethnocentricism.

This second part continues the discussion of Bible translator Eugene Nida as his reductive Bible translation theory opposed others'.

Two others we will discuss are Naomi Seidman and Lynell Marchese Zogbo. I am particularly interested in how Seidman sees that "translation," by Nida's approach, "becomes the very erasure of time and difference from the scene of writing," and by "erasure" Seidman means the elimination of what is Jewish in the writing of the Bible. Likewise, I'm curious about the way Zogbo writes differently about Bible translation than Nida has, she seeming to go out of the way almost not to make his mistake of disregard for the Bible of the Jews. Seidman is Jewish. Zogbo is Christian, like Nida, and she herself even theorizes and practices translation of the Bible by Nida's dynamic equivalence translation theory. In other words, if we look at this discussion from an-other's perspective, then Nida has committed that ethnocentric error of his in the name of his Western science. What’s more, Seidman has been offended by that error, and Zogbo has sought to recover from it.

Naomi Seidman writes the following in her book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Afterlives of the Bible). It should be fairly clear how Nida comes across to her:

In Western translation discourse, narrative -- as history or as literature -- has taken a secondary role to theory. There may be reasons for this that inhere in the conceptualization of translation in Western thought. Because translation is conceived as the production of a linguistic equivalent that will substitute for the "original" text, and because the dominant method for rendering such apparent equivalents has been the production of a text that "reads like the original," the very figure of the translator, as a historical figure exercising creative agency, has been an encumbrance. As Lawrence Venuti argues in The Translator's Invisibility, the figure of the translator has been elided by the normative logic of translation. And it is not only the translator who has been forgotten in Western translation. History, too, as the temporal horizon within which translations emerge and acquire their meaning, is collapsed and neutralized in a discourse that imagines translation as the "recovery" of an original meaning, or, in Eugene Nida's influential approach, as a technique that aims at restaging the effect of the source text on its first readers. Translation, in these discourses, becomes the very erasure of time and difference from the scene of writing. Translation narrative, read not as transparent truth but rather as ideologically marked "emplotment," is the privileged means by which I will attempt to read the movement of history on the stage of Jewish-Christian translation; my father's story is the first of the narratives I will discuss. (pages 2-3)

Hopefully you can see that, although Nida is not the central character in Seidman’s narrative, he is nonetheless at the center of what she posits as forgetful Western translation. And so whom is forgotten? Isn’t it the Jews?

And ironically Nida’s theory, constructed to bring the message of the Bible to all, actually neglects that the Bible is culturally Jewish. The Nida message you should be able to read in your own heart language is this: “[D]ifferences between cultures cause many more severe complications for the [Dynamic Equivalence] translator than do differences in language structure.” So let me translate this for you. Let me tell you what this means without your getting distracted by the direct quotation marks or the original context or the original cultural pattern here. What Nida means is that, by his theory, it’s much easier to dispose of linguistic symbols that get in the way of the communication code than it is to erase dissimilarities between your own culture and that of the Other. If you are Christian, or potentially Christian, the language symbols of Hebrew or Hebraic Hellene or Judaic Aramaic can be more easily discounted than can the Jewish history or the Culture, perhaps, cultures of the Jews be disregarded. But, nonetheless, and however, one must try, for the sake of the message of the Bible, which is Christian, not Jewish.

Seidman notices how Nida wrote the entry called "Bible translation" for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. She notes in particular what he says, in part, and how contrastive it is to the Jewish cultural patterns for the translator, the history, the literature, and the very discourse of the Bible. She pays attention to his message but also to how he encodes his message. His communiqué and also his symbols are important to her. She notes that this way:

... Eugene Nida, the premier linguist and translation consultant of both the American and United Bible Societies, boldly begins his entry with the sentence "The Bible is the holy book of Christianity" and continues by celebrating Bible translating as “arguably the greatest undertaking in interlingual communication in the history of the world.” By contrast, Michael Alpert's entry for Torah translation suggests that translation among Jewish communities historically had a different function than in non-Jewish communities: “Generally speaking, translations of the Torah have traditionally been read not as texts in their own right but rather as aides to comprehension. . . . Jewish scriptural study is informed less by translation than by the running commentaries of the mediaeval scholars.”

Nevertheless, Jews could not and did not avoid translation; nor did they always see it as merely adjunct to the Hebrew text. Alpert himself writes that “the first historical report of translation is in the Bible itself,” in the phrase in Nehemiah 8:8 that says that the Jewish exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth century BCE “read from the book of the law of God clearly, made its sense plain and gave instruction in what was read (NEB); he continues by citing the midrashic reading of this verse, “That is to say, they read the Torah with translation and commentary.” Whether or not we date Jewish translation as early as Alpert and the midrash do, Frederick Greenspahn points out that Jewish biblical translation certainly began even before the Bible had been completed and canonized – the Greek Septuagint, the first extant Bible translation (originally only the Pentateuch), is dated to the third century BCE. (pages 14-15)

Seidman has much more to say about Nida pe se. Let us just notice here, nonetheless, how she’s interested in highlighting the record of the histories of Jewish translation of the Bible as a Jewish canon. In contrast, Nida is not. And she notices.

For the wide, not-just-missionary-Bible-translator audience of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida states that the significance of Bible translation has little to do with the Jews. Just before he writes his short “History of Bible translation” as part of his encyclopedia entry, he says, “The significance of Bible translating can be readily sensed when we consider that at least one book of the Scriptures has been translated and published in 2009 languages and dialects, spoken by a minimum of 97 per cent of the world’s population” (page 23). Then Nida sketches the history:

The history of Bible translation may be divided into three principal periods: the Greco-Roman (200 BC to AD 700), the Reformation (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and the modern period which covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or what are often spoken of as ‘the missionary centuries’.

Nida takes each of his principal periods in turn, and writes a paragraph on each (two paragraphs on the missionary centuries in which he mentions his own organization’s work), but in each, his history elides the Jews and hints that if ever one constructs a history of Bible translation that includes the Jews, then it should progress away from them to everyone else. The closest Nida gets to acknowledging Jewishness in this particularly history he’s written for a wider audience is when he starts his history. “The first translation,” he begins with his paragraph on the Greco-Roman period, “was the Greek Septuagint Version of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, made primarily in the second century BC. This translation had an enormous influence on matters of canon, translation principles, and vocabulary employed in Christian Scriptures” (page 23, my emphasis).

Notice how Nida fails to mention Jews at all, though he does acknowledge that it was “the Hebrew Bible” translation that, as a first translation, became an influence on “Christian Scriptures.” Nida mentions none of the Jewish controversy surrounding the legend of the Septuagint. Nor does he discuss (as Seidman and Alpert do) the story, the Hebrew Bible’s own textual and midrashic histories of “the Jewish exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth century BCE” and who produced a translation long before “the Greek Septuagint Version of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.”

Now we turn to Lynell Zogbo. When the editors of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies decided it was time for a new edition, they invited Zogbo to write the entry on Bible translation. Zogbo entitles her entry “Bible, Jewish and Christian.” She starts in this way:

“The Bible, from the Greek biblia, meaning ‘books’, is the sacred text of both Jews and Christians.”

Her section on “History of Bible translation” within her entry begins this way:

The beginnings of Bible translation can be traced back to an incident recounted in the book of Nehemiah (8:5-8) many centuries before the birth of Christ. After living for several decades in exile in Babylon, many Jews no longer spoke or even understood Hebrew. Thus, when the exiles returned to Jerusalem, and Ezra called the people together to listen to the reading of the Law of Moses, the Levite priests had to translate the meaning of the sacred texts into Aramaic so that people could understand. Since that time, Jews and Christians have continued to emphasize the importance of the Scriptures being understood by all believers.

The earliest known written translation of the Bible is the Septuagint, a translation from Hebrew into Greek of the Old Testament texts, carried out primarily for Greek-speaking Jews living in the Graeco-Roman diaspora. . . . Although this translation and its interpretations of the Hebrew text have been criticized since its inception, . . . the Septuagint retains considerable influence on questions of interpretation and textual matters, and its study continues to shed light on the principles of translation used in the ancient world. However, in the second century CD, Jewish scholars – Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus – produced new translations and/ or revised versions of the Septuagint, . . . . The Targum, literally ‘translation’, is a kind of running paraphrase of and commentary on the Hebrew text in Aramaic, originating from before the time of Christ but still read publicly in synagogues around the world today.

Notice the Jewish centrality in the Bible and in the translation of the Bible and in its history that Zogbo highlights in her entry for the second edition Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. This in contrast to Nida’s entry. It’s almost as if Zogbo talked with Seidman, and listened.

Dynamic un-Equivalence: Nida v. Pike

This post may be the beginning of a series.  Mainly, I'm wanting to show that not all Bible translators are equal, that not even all of the Wycliffe Bible Translation / SIL translators of the bible are equal.  Hopefully, you'll be able to see that not all are nearly as reductive about the Bible, language, literature, linguistics, and translation as was Eugene Nida.

Nida passed away last week, and his simple now-famous notion of Dynamic Equivalence is getting revisited as it's getting blogged about this week.

Somebody else passed away last week also, and I want to blog about her this week.  In this post, I'd like to blog about her understandings of translating too.  What Nida wrote and propagated, so reductively, worked against her practices some.  So please stay tuned for more on this person and her translation work after we review Nida.

In the interests of trying to keep this post as brief as possible, let me just focus on "reductive" with respect to "translation."  Nida wrote,

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]:  one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."  

Nida is writing as if there is, fundamentally, reductively, just one choice.  Notice the "either / or" binary:

EITHER (A) translation is a "formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," and "[t]he type of translation which most completely typifies this structural equivalence might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original."

OR (B) there is, "[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message."

This is from Nida's book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, in his chapter "Principles of Correspondence," where he writes a section he entitles "Two Basic Orientations in Translating," on page 159.  Earlier in the book, Nida had already begun to develop his now-famous theory as the opposite of "formal equivalence."  Here is the title and first paragraph and first "toward-a-science-of-translating" figure of this chapter (on pages 120-21):

"THE DYNAMIC DIMENSION IN COMMUNICATION

Language consists of more than the meanings of the symbols and the combinations of symbols; it is essentially a code in operation, or, in other words, a code functioning for a specific purpose or purposes.  Thus we must analyze the transmission of a message in terms of a dynamic dimension.  This analysis is especially important for translating, since the production of equvalent messages is a process, not merely of matching the parts of utterances, but also of reproducing the total dynamic character of the communication.  Without both elements the results can scarcely be regarded, in any real sense, as equivalent."

The figure, ironically enough, is Nida's symbol or set of pure symbols by which he's explaining, again reductively, how language is "more than the meanings of the symbols and the combinations of the symbols."  Nida is reducing language to a very reductive model of "communication."  And this is his main point.  This is his main need:  to get rid of and to provide an alternative for what he calls "formal equivalence."  His main point is that the Bible can be reduced to a message and that all the rest, the symbols and their combinations and their meanings, is just fluff.  A message, dynamically, then is equivalent to "The Communique of God."  The Communique of God should come to you, whatever language you read, with "complete naturalness of expression," with "modes of behavior relevant within the context of [your] own culture," and without requiring "that [you] understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message."  It's as if Nida is saying, Forget the context of the Jews and their source languages; in your own natural expressions in the context of your own culture, then, comprehend the message.

Now, I already mentioned that somebody else died last week.  Her name is Eunice Victoria Pike.  She was an R.N., a Registered Nurse by professional training.  She was also a linguist, a literary one, who loved the Bible and worked on its translation.  She wrote a biography of her much more famous brother, Kenneth Lee Pike, and maybe that's how you might of heard of them.  Together, they co-authored a book on translation and on language entitled, Live Issues in Descriptive Linguistics.  Here's their pictures (the two youngest on the left with their other siblings, and then the two together a few years later) from Eunice's biography of Ken:

Ken would talk about how much in debt he was to Eunice, how much he learned from her (I know, because I heard him so talk in his home, when she was there, and in the classroom, talking about his theory of language and of translation, when she was not present).  I learned from her too in the lecture halls, while doing an M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington but going to the SIL campus in Dallas from time to time.  Last week, there was a sweet memorial service for her, not many attending at all, just Eunie's closest friends and her sister-in-law Evelyn.  The obituary has still not been published for her, and there won't be any mention of her on the websites of the United Bible Society or of Christianity Today.  Bloggers won't be remembering her influence on them or won't be arguing that her work is to be regarded as important.

You can find online how Valentina Pavlovna Wassona and R. Gordon Wasson published one of Eunice Pike's helpful letters to them in their book Mushrooms, Russia, and History: Volume II.   If you read it for yourself, you'll read how much they learned from Pike about mushrooms, about how she herself learned from others by listening and by interacting.  This reminded me of what she wrote for a larger audience in her book, An Uttermost Part, in the chapter, "Jehovah," in which she tells the story of letting the new testament, as a boy was reading it (right at I John 4:1), explain "that visions received through the hallucinatory mushroom were not messages from Christ" even though "[m]ost Mazatecs assumed [through syncretistic lore] that they were" (page 105).

Now that I've started you listening to some of the stories, why not listen to a few more "lived issues" in the descriptive linguistics and translation work of Pike?  She writes, in her book Words Wanted, of actually working with Nida to check her translation from Greek into Mazatec. 

"Dr. Nida sat with the Greek and the Spanish New Testament in front of him, and I with the Mazatec.  My job was to look at the Mazatec and give him a quick literal translation into English.  He compared what I said with the Greek, asked questions, and agreed or disagreed.

Among other things he pointed out that we had translated a number of Greek metaphors rather than the specific words.  One example was found in Acts 14:8.  'Being a cripple from his mother's womb' was the Greek expression, but no Mazatec ever says that.  'Ever since he was born,' Dr. Nida suggested.  He emphasized the fact that it was the message we were supposed to get across, not just words" (page 96).

It may sound as if Nida's corrective of Pike was one that she followed absolutely and without questioning.  However, if you keep reading, then you do hear in her story some of her reluctance on the very next page:

"We could even apply the suggestions Dr. Nida had made for the Book of Acts.  Well -- (sigh) -- O.K.  We would change [to make some revisions]" (page 96) 

Her view of language, of translation, is far more robust than his reductive notion is.  She saw the Greek in the book of Acts as meaningful, as important to learn from, even for an English reader.  Could the Greek letters and words and phrases be reduced to a message?  Did it have to merely and so baldly mean simply and only this message:  "Ever since he was born"?  Doesn't this translating rob the mother of her biology, of her womb, of her body?  And should the Mazatec then literally now equal the English, which only dynamically equaled then the Greek?  Do you see the problems that Nida's reductive either/ or approach causes?

As evidence of how much more astute Pike was about language than Nida, let's look at other things she observed.  She learned from her Mazatec-speaking friends that men, not women, will "whistle-talk."  This whistle-talk was not with speech, not with words, but was with the "symbols" of pitch.  The whistle-talk, moreover, was not a whistled song.  "A whistled song was smooth, almost continuous, whereas whistle-talk was punctuated with pauses [with pitches that] were limited [and was] slower and more stately than music."  She bemoaned the fact that she herself had never learned to whistle, not even a song.  But she laughed that being a woman gave her a pass:

"The only thing that saved me from being completely outclassed was the fact that in Mazatec culture women were not supposed to whistle.  They understood the men's whistle-talk, but unless they were tomboys they responded verbally [i.e., with spoken words, phrases, clauses, and sentences]" (page 30).

And Pike, a woman, learned whistle-talk, from a woman, no less:

"Ida was a tomboy, and she was not the least bit ashamed of whistling.  With her help we learned to recognize and approximate, 'Come here,' 'What do you want?', and a few other frequently used expressions.  Much of her teaching was done while we were walking, and I did pretty well on the level part of the trail, but after we had climbed a little while, I quit trying.  Ever-impatient Ida wanted to know why.  I told her that I had not any breath.  She chuckled and turned to her friend, 'Poor thing.  She left her breath down the path.  God down and get it for her" (page 30).

Notice several things from this story about Pike and her robust, non-reductive view of language and of translation:

1. She acknowledged sociolinguistic differences between men and women in speech acts.
2. She did not require women to obey the men's rules for whether woman could whistle-talk or not.
3. As a woman, she learned from another women to do only what men were to do.
4. The whistle-talk was full of discernible emic (insider) symbols and form and forms.
5. A merely dynamic equivalence of whistle-talk as only a message to be communicated would lose much meaning and much social interaction.
6. Communication, a message, was important in whistle-talk, but it wasn't the only important thing to be learned, performed, or translated.
7. She was humble, a learner, and relied on friendly people to teach her the significances of language.
8. She laughed and enjoyed word play and engaged in humor through puns and indirect and robust messages that were infinitely dimensioned.
9. She appreciated language as translatable, as messageS, as multi-modal, as varied within any given mode, as social, as gendered, as feminist-resistances, and on and on.

The above is not an exhaustive list.  I'm just making a few observations off the top of my head.  You should have more to make.

Lest we get so formulaic with these enumerations, let me give just one more story from Pike (and there are, oh, so many in the books I've already mentioned by her).  Here's the one in which she pays attention to learning and to teaching and to collaborative learning in Mazatec and its translation.  Listen, enjoy:

"[T]he subject [among us women] changed to the apron I was wearing.  It was a plastic apron, and one of the women asked me what it was called.  I was always startled when they asked me the name for something in Mazatec.  I was the one who was trying to learn their language, and it had not occurred to me that I could teach them any of it.  I answered with a word I thought appropriate, [the Mazatec phrase for] apron.

'Is that cloth?' asked one of the women and felt it.  Then I remembered that the parts that made up the [the Mazatec] word apron meant, 'cloth-put-against.'  No, it was not cloth -- so what should it be called?  The women discussed the problem.  First they wanted to know what it was actually made of.  They did not have a word for plastic, so the best I could dos was to tell them that it was something like rubber -- the word they used when describing any waterproof material.  The women tried out the combination 'rubber-put-against' but they rejected it.  Finally, a bit hesitatingly, they agreed on 'cloth-put-against-which-is-rubber,' that is, a 'rubber apron.'  That little incident helped me to see that the original meaning of word parts (like cloth) can be lost when the broader meaning of the compound has become well established.  Little hint like that helped me to be patient with visitors -- I was constantly learning from them -- and encouraged me to go calling" (page 33).

So what did she learn?  How did she theorize language and practice translation?  And what do you learn from Pike that Nida's reductive model would not allow?

Womanism, Fascism, and DE Translation

George Lakoff’s and Eugene Nida’s theories of language and of translation fail to do enough. Their theories, in their efforts at Aristotelian objectivism, would bear Moses’s authority and would keep Onesimus.

(Warning: in this post, there’s a little word play but little child’s play. In other words, this thing is full of high-horse, academic jargon, which is where much power language lives. Dialog is welcome here, because in translation, especially "dynamic equivalence" or DE translation, there's still too much silencing of the marginalized.)

First, then, two true stories about children and words. Call them personal testimonies to the power of parables. Not long ago, a friend of mine told me her grade school daughter came home from school and declared: “Mommy, I know the ‘d-word’ and I know the ‘s-word’ and I know the ‘f-word’ too.” My friend replied, “Oh, Melissa, I’m so sorry you have to learn these words. Who told you what they mean?” But the little girl persisted: “the ‘d-word’ is ‘dumb,’ and the ‘s-word’ is ‘stupid’ and the ‘f-word’ is ‘faker.’” The mother suppressed her smile and her sigh of relief, and proceeded to give her child a lesson in the proper and improper uses of such "four letter words." The second true parable is this: my son when in grade school came home and asked, “Mom, is sex bad?” My wife gave him a long answer, dynamically equivalent to his question. But I’ll explain the problems below.

Linguists and others familiar with the work of George Lakoff may note how my title here plays on one of his: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Likely, some of you will remember Lakoff’s opener. He begins: “Many readers, I suspect, will take the title of this book as suggesting that women, fire, and dangerous things have something in common—say, that women are fiery and dangerous.” (He confesses that he is “inspired by the Australian aboriginal language Dyirbal, which has a category, balan, that actually includes women, fire, and dangerous things.”) With sure, confident certainty, he recalls the mixed reactions to his word play: “Most feminists I’ve mentioned it to have loved the title for that reason, though some have hated it for the same reason” (page 5).

Lakoff shows the arbitrary-but-common, nevertheless-coherent Dyirbal category of balan and its appositioned members. (Fortunately for his readers, Lakoff translates these members into English as “women,” “fire,” and “dangerous things” ). Unfortunately, in unveiling his title and its unifying term, balan, he can’t help but make a point about divisiveness among readers. Ironically, Lakoff can only assume he stands above them with a more unified, a more objective, approach. And yet you, reading closely (in English only), should be able to see his own arbitrary and coherent category of overlapping but varying members of readers: (1) “many readers,” (2) “most feminists,” and (3) “some [feminists who] have hated.”

That is, Lakoff believes that all of those “many readers” (e.g., those in group 1) can’t help but “take” his title to represent “women, fire, and dangerous things” as having “something in common.” Likewise, he believes that all of those “most feminists” (e.g., those in group 2) hold the same three variants in the title (e.g., “women,” and “fire,” and “dangerous things”) as part of the same single category (e.g., the “something in common. . . for that [same] reason”). And Lakoff believes that each and every one of the “some [feminists who] have hated” the title (e.g., those in group 3) have nonetheless belonged in the category with all of those who will take the three noun phrases of his main title to belong to the same single category (e.g., all readers). In summary, as Dyirbal holds together at least three unlikely terms in a single-word category so Lakoff identifies as dynamically equivalent his three explicitly-named groups of readers.

But neither Lakoff nor any of us reading his title can easily identify a single categorical word in English (such as balan, so superficially foregrounded in Dyirbal) that would name his category and ours (e.g., the category “that actually includes” the variant members (1) “many readers,” (2) “most feminists,” and (3) “some [feminists who] have hated [the title]”). If the common meaning were not so “transparent,” we English readers should perhaps agree on the noun phrase, readers. You see, Lakoff is trying to keep all of his readers (in one big dynamic readership). And he’s telling us all, as if objectively, something about our categories and our minds that we cannot categorize and comprehend either alone or collectively as part of a group of his readers. After more than 580 pages of carefully explicated examples, Lakoff begins his “Afterword,” by writing:

I began work on this book with the knowledge that objectivist views of the mind have a very wide currency in the academic world. Among my principal aims has been to characterize that view, name it, point out that it is an opinion, not a fundamental truth, and raise the question of its validity, so that is can be discussed in the open and no longer be presumed automatically as part of an unquestioned background. (page 586)

Nevertheless, Lakoff’s unnamed assumptions exemplify and enact the very “objectivist views of the mind” he purports to write against. For all the naming he does do, Lakoff fails to “point out [how his] is an opinion, not a fundamental truth”; and, to be sure, his opinion is that as an expert linguist (not a woman, not even a feminist) tenured at Berkeley he is objectively recording the facts, albeit the now-obvious facts about the dubious “objective views.”

To best interpret his argument, then, we readers can only try to “raise the question [of Lakoff’s argument’s] validity, so that it [is] discussed in the open and [is] no longer presupposed automatically as part of an unquestioned background” (page 586). What we have to attempt to do, now, is to show that Lakoff’s book (and our reading and critiquing it) is based on profound, unnamed, and unquestioned categories of belief, from our own subjective perspectives. What we might end up seeing is that his argument-belief contradiction (and even ours) is emblematic of slippery, sloppy language that DE translators want to tidy up. From his title to his closing words, Lakoff counts on all of his readers to believe certain categories, to suspend their disbelief, and to take his categories for granted as theirs. And we do go along, even if we “hate” it. But, oddly, Lakoff is careful to report, as an “objectivist” would, that there are the “some [feminists who] have hated [his title].” Suspiciously, the author himself cannot observe his title to be hateful or hate provoking. It’s “some feminists” who are in that category, and he is not.

So we can go on: neither Lakoff nor we his readers can easily fathom something more profound and problematic. That is this: if Lakoff could ever have written the book in Dyirbal, then how transparent balan would be to the Aboriginal native speakers. Of course, not much considering what deep suppositions they might have about us, we may tend to presume them to be illiterates and not necessarily speakers of English, and not linguists, feminists, or thinking people of any discipline. Yet wouldn’t and shouldn’t they be suspicious that we might read (as Lakoff suggests in English we will) the phrase “women, fire, and dangerous things” as suggesting “that women are fiery and dangerous”? Is it not a stretch to imagine, analogously, that readers (of English or of Dyirbal) would take the title “Womanism, Fascism, and Dynamic Equivalence Translation” to mean that womanism and fascism are dynamically equal? As we interpret, we do prefer not to be interpreted.

Specifically, we desire our vocabularies not to be mixed, our beliefs not to be contradicted, and our categories not to be exposed. Otherwise, when drawing sharp lines of distinction, we might be found sitting on the side of the others we criticize. Such is the case of George Lakoff (e.g., exposing objectivist views by employing the objectivist perspective, that would transcend a feminist and an Aboriginal critique). But he knows that he, and we, and they all do play the dynamic equivalence game.

We might have gone on long enough here. You can get “the meanings” of womanism and fascism and dynamic equivalency translation theory from a dictionary or an encyclopedia.

But I do think we’d do well to see what’s going on. There are positions of power, for any reader, for any translator. And the insider and outsider positions are subjective. Even the most objective scientist will use his or her head and his or her heart and stomach. Even the most artsy translator will find, in a text to be translated and its translation, at least these three alternative perspectives: particle (i.e., a unit), or wave (i.e., dynamism and change), or field (i.e., relativity in context). (Such is the contribution of the late great Kenneth Pike to language and translation). So Lakoff is on to something, wanting to resist objectivity, if he could only acknowledge how he assumes power over, say, feminists who hate his title and the Dyirbal speakers he presumes to speak for. And Nida, by referring to his translation approach as “dynamic equivalence” is on to something. Dynamic seems to be wavy (though it isn’t always in DE). Equivalence assumes a field of relationship (albeit an impossibly ideal one). And Translation (as DE) likes to think of itself as an objective thing, a particle if you will. But.

Let’s listen to a womanist, then a fascist. And let’s see how dynamically equivalent we may be to them. (I haven’t forgotten the children in the true parables above. We’ll hear them out too).

Now Alice Walker, the afrafeminist who coined “womanism,” didn’t write the Bible. She did write a book called The Temple of My Familiar. Let’s listen in on some of the characters’ conversations:

“‘You are saying,’ I asked her, ‘that all evil, like racism or sexism, is a result of sickness?’

“‘Not only that,’ she whispered, ‘the child will always, as an adult, do to someone else whatever was done to him when he was a child. It is how we, as human beings, are made. I shudder to think what Hitler’s childhood was like,’ she said. (page 310)

“ . . . I told her bluntly that I was in therapy, trying to get to the roots of my anger against white people. I didn’t tell her it was particularly against whites who were blond. I guess I was afraid she’d say, like so many people do: Well, everybody hates Nazis. That’s what they think I mean. They think of Hitler’s Aryan race as played by bleached-blond actors on TV. That image is, I know, only a small part of it. (page 326)

Now Lakoff and Nida might protest here. This is literature. The categories in non-literary works are not equal to others. Apples and oranges. We ought to know better.

So let’s all keep moving, then. To something more familiar. To translation of a didactic text or an epistolary one. How about these:

“Es ist immer der gleiche Jude. Daß diese Selbstverständlichkeit von einem normalen heutigen Ministerialrat oder höheren Polizeibeamten nicht begriffen wird, ist freilich auch selbstverständlich”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“He is always the same Jew. That so obvious a fact is not recognized by the average head-clerk in a German government department, or by an officer in the police administration, is also a self-evident and natural fact”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (DE translator James Murphy)

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

So let’s start with the most familiar (since, fortunately, more of us read the Bible and the Declaration of Independence it’s based on more than we do Mein Kampf).

Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration may name some (e.g., “the merciless Indian Savages”) while it unnames others (e.g., black males and women, regardless of color but especially black women). But it excludes all of them equally from the category of “all men created equal.” Moreover, the liberating document—invoking the names of God and of Nature—binds together, in an unintended dynamic equivalence, the revolutionary colonizers and their abusive King into one elite group: property owners, who are white men. These truths, if they are “to be self-evident,” we must hold; and we hold them to a certain advantage: our own. To read the Declaration of Independence otherwise is to see the inequalities in its explicit and implicit “natural” classes of ownership, race, and gender.

But “we” might be outsiders to a Nazi’s experience, and more to Alice Walker’s characters’ experiences. Neither we nor Adolf Hitler or Walker will interpret as equal both (A) his Übermensch and (B) the reality of her whispering black women. And only few of us (namely translator James Murphy) might see the phrase “self-evident” as a good translation of freilich; not many of us could believe or should want to imply that Hitler follows some method of Jefferson and is thereby less sinister. However, we all know that human beings have the power to call disparate things equal. Likewise, “we” in community can “hold these truths” in our collective subjectivity “to be self evident.” And we acknowledge our Creator, depending on our perspective of outsider or insider, as creating all men and women equal.

So back to the parables. My friend and her daughter were in learning conversation. Each was learning from the other. What the girl meant by “the s- word” was not anything “stupid” at all. And when calling it a “four-letter word,” the mother could take the context, and the power issues on the playground, and discover that the demeaning-term category often includes five letters.

And my son? After awkwardly listening to his mother discuss good sex and bad, he replied. “No Mom; not sex. Sucks. Is sucks a bad word?”

(No, DE translators; not authority, rather “Moses’s seat.” And not Onesimus the slave; rather “Handy” the handy name of a human being “above a slave in the flesh and in the Master.”)