(November 11, 1914 – August 25, 2011)

Life

Nida was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
on November 11, 1914. He became a Christian at a young age, when he
responded to the altar call at his church “to accept Christ as my
Saviour.”^[2]
He graduated summa cum laude from the University of California
in 1936. After graduating he attended Camp Wycliffe, where Bible
translation theory was taught. He ministered for a short time among the
Tarahumara Indians in Chihuahua, Mexico, until health problems due to an
inadequate diet and the high altitude forced him to leave. Sometime in
this period, Nida became a founding charter member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a sister organization of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
In 1937, Nida undertook studies at the University of Southern California,
where he obtained a Master’s Degree in New Testament Greek in 1939. In
that same year, Eugene Nida became interim pastor of Calvary Church of Santa Ana, California, after the founding pastor resigned in 1939.^[3]
In spite of his conservative background, in later years Nida became
increasingly ecumenical and New Evangelical in his approach.^[4]
In 1943, Nida received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan,
he was ordained as a Baptist minister, and he married Althea Lucille
Sprague. The couple remained married until Althea Sprague Nida’s death
in 1993. In 1997, Nida married Dr. María Elena Fernandez-Miranda, a
lawyer and diplomatic attache.
Nida retired in the early 1980s, although he kept on giving lectures
in universities all around the world, and lived in Madrid, Spain and Brussels, Belgium. He died in Madrid on August 25, 2011 aged 96.^[5]

Career

In 1943, Nida began his career as a linguist with the American Bible Society
(ABS). He was quickly promoted to Associate Secretary for Versions,
then worked as Executive Secretary for Translations until his
retirement.
Nida was instrumental in engineering the joint effort between the Vatican and the United Bible Societies
(UBS) to produce cross-denominational Bibles in translations across the
globe. This work began in 1968 and was carried on in accordance with
Nida’s translation principle of Functional Equivalence.

Theories

Nida has been a pioneer in the fields of translation theory and linguistics.
His Ph.D. dissertation, A Synopsis of English Syntax, was the
first full-scale analysis of a major language according to the
“immediate-constituent” theory. His most notable contribution to
translation theory is Dynamic Equivalence, also known as Functional
Equivalence. For more information, see “Dynamic and formal equivalence.”
Nida also developed the “componential-analysis” technique, which split
words into their components to help determine equivalence in translation
(e.g. “bachelor” = male + unmarried). This is, perhaps, not the best example of the technique, though it is the most well-known.
Nida’s dynamic-equivalence theory is often held in opposition to the views of philologists who maintain that an understanding of the source text
(ST) can be achieved by assessing the inter-animation of words on the
page, and that meaning is self-contained within the text (i.e. much more
focused on achieving semantic equivalence).
This theory, along with other theories of correspondence in translating, are elaborated in his essay Principles of Correspondence,^[6]
where Nida begins by asserting that given that “no two languages are
identical, either in the meanings given to corresponding symbols or in
the ways in which symbols are arranged in phrases and sentences, it
stands to reason that there can be no absolute correspondence between
languages. Hence, there can be no fully exact translations.” ^[7] While the impact of a translation may be close to the original, there can be no identity in detail.
Nida then sets forth the differences in translation, as he would
account for it, within three basic factors: (1) The nature of the
message: in some messages the content is of primary consideration, and
in others the form must be given a higher priority. (2) The purpose of
the author and of the translator: to give information on both form and
content; to aim at full intelligibility of the reader so he/she may
understand the full implications of the message; for imperative purposes
that aim at not just understanding the translation but also at ensuring
no misunderstanding of the translation. (3) The type of audience:
prospective audiences differ both in decoding ability and in potential interest.
Nida brings in the reminder that while there are no such things as “identical equivalents”
in translating, what one must in translating seek to do is find the
“closest natural equivalent”. Here he identifies two basic orientations
in translating based on two different types of equivalence: Formal
Equivalence (F-E) and Dynamic Equivalence (D-E).
F-E focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. Such translations then would be concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept
to concept. Such a formal orientation that typifies this type of
structural equivalence is called a “gloss translation” in which the
translator aims at reproducing as literally and meaningfully as possible
the form and content of the original.
The principles governing an F-E translation would then be:
reproduction of grammatical units; consistency in word usage; and
meanings in terms of the source context.
D-E on the other hand aims at complete “naturalness” of expression. A
D-E translation is directed primarily towards equivalence of response
rather than equivalence of form. The relationship between the target
language receptor
and message should be substantially the same as that which existed
between the original (source language) receptors and the message.
The principles governing a D-E translation then would be: conformance of a translation to the receptor language and culture as a whole; and the translation must be in accordance with the context of the message which involves the stylistic selection and arrangement of message constituents.
Nida and Venuti have proved that translation studies
is a much more complex discipline than may first appear, with the
translator having to look beyond the text itself to deconstruct on an
intra-textual level and decode on a referential level—assessing
culture-specific items, idiom and figurative language to achieve an understanding of the source text
and embark upon creating a translation which not only transfers what
words mean in a given context, but also recreates the impact of the
original text within the limits of the translator’s own language system
(linked to this topic: George Steiner, the Hermeneutic Motion, pragmatics, field, tenor, mode and the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary).
For example, a statement that Jesus “met” someone must be carefully
translated into a language which distinguishes between “met for the
first time”, “met habitually” and simple “met”.
Nida was once criticised for a controversial change in the Revised Standard Version Bible translation regarding the removal of the word “virgin” from Isaiah 7:14.^[8] However, as Peter Thuesen’s book In Discordance with the Scriptures points out, Nida was not actually a committee member for that project.^[9]

Works

Published Works include the following:

• Linguistic Interludes – (Glendale, CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1944 (Revised 1947))
• The Bible Translator – (Journal founded and edited by Dr. Nida (retired), 1949- )
• Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words – (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1949)
• Message and Mission – (Harper, 1960)
• Customs, Culture and Christianity – (Tyndale Press, 1963)
• Toward a Science of Translating – (Brill, 1964)
• Religion Across Cultures – (Harper, 1968)
• The Theory and Practice of Translation – (Brill, 1969, with C.R. Taber)
• Language Structure and Translation: Essays – (Stanford University Press, 1975)
• From One Language to Another – (Nelson, 1986, with Jan de Waard)
• The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains – (UBS, 1988, with Louw)
• Contexts in Translating – (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amterdam, 2002)
• Fascinated by Languages – (John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2003)

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