week 3a

EUGENE A. NIDA AND HIS “PRINCIPLES OF CORRESPONDENCE”

According to Ezra Pound, “in the long run the translator is in all probability impotent to do all of the work for the linguistically lazy reader” (1954: 200). Even though more than fifty years (and if taken into account of the fact that Pound’s essay entitled Cavalcanti was first published in 1934, it can also be said more than seventy years) have passed since Pound’s comment, the situation still maintains its original state. Indeed, a reader demands –logically and naturally– to have in his/her hands a translation that is equivalent of the original work, and seems to neglect all the process which the translator has been through in order to reach that equivalence in the work s/he created. It is merely the outcome that counts for the reader.

In terms of Translation Studies, however, the very word “equivalence” is more than a term to be observed and studied as an outcome, and as a matter of fact, many fruitful attempts have been made in order to found a theory of equivalence within the realm of the discipline. Of these studies, Eugene A. Nida’s work has taken particularly linguistics as a focal point for the arguments raised in the study.

The theory of equivalence in Translation Studies was analyzed in detail by the American scholar Eugene A. Nida (mostly celebrated with his Holy Bible translation apart from his theoretical contributions to translation studies) in his article entitled “Principles of Correspondence” in 1964. Prior to explaining his assumptions regarding the concept of equivalence, Nida first suggests three different types of translations: “(1) the nature of the message, (2) the purpose or purposes of the author and, by proxy, of the translator, and (3) the type of the audience” (2000: 127). Nida’s distinction among the types of translations in the beginning of his work can be regarded as an evident sign of the author’s main concern with the content and with the form of the message. Nida goes on examining the nature of the message in terms of content and form by showing discriminations of poetry translation. Actually, the author connects these two components of translations and analyzes them in the sense of content and style: “The primary purpose of the translator may be information as to both content and form” (ibid: 128). Furthermore, Nida sets forth the type of the audience (the capacity of children, literates, the average literate adult and the decoding ability of the specialists’ of the target society) which the translation is intended to reach has to be taken into consideration as well.

After giving a brief account of three types of different translations, Nida asserts two sorts of equivalence: The former, namely the formal equivalence (which takes the message of the source text in both form and content as a focal point, and tries to render it word to word, concept to concept, etc), and the latter, being the dynamic equivalence (which aims at revealing the whole naturalness of the source language in the target language). Additionally, the author discusses the basic requirements of a translation from various angles, and draws a conclusion related to translation: “What one must attempt, however, is an affective blend of ‘matter and manner’, for these two aspects of any message are inseparably united” (ibid: 134).

Despite the fact that in Nida’s article, the reader might grasp that the author is in favor of the implementation of the dynamic equivalence as a more productive translation process, he maintains that the formal equivalence in translation can still be appropriate for specific type of audience: “It might be supposed that such translations are categorically ruled out. To the contrary, they are often perfectly valid translations of certain types of messages for certain types of audiences” (ibid: 135). Although Nida holds a supportive opinion towards formal equivalence in some respects, he is mainly concerned with the notion of dynamic equivalence in translation. “In such a translation”, writes Nida, “the focus attention is directed not so much toward the source message, as toward the receptor response” (ibid: 136). In other words, in agreement with the author, dynamic equivalence can be explained as a translation principle according to which a translator pursues to translate the meaning of the original text in a way which would have the same effect on the target culture reader. Nida goes on his article by drawing attention to the governing terms of dynamic equivalence translation and justifies his argument by providing various examples of the Holy Bible translation.

In the general scheme of Eugene A. Nida’s linguistic based approach on translation, one can observe that his study seem to neglect the socio-cultural aspect of translation to some extent. Moreover, translation in its very nature is not a solely matter of linguistics but also includes contributions from other fields as well. Although this notion of translation seems to be disregarded by Nida to some degree, his fruitful analysis rife with corresponding examples regarding the notion of equivalence can be regarded as an important study within the realm of Translation Studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eugene Nida, “The Principles of Correspondence” in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, London-New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 126-140

Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New York and Directions, and London: Faber and Faber, 1954