Discussion in the Bible translation world often focuses around two acronyms: FE and DE, formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, respectively.
- FE, also known as word-for-word translation, places greater emphasis on translating the original words of the source text. FE sacrifices an idiomatic understanding of the text in an attempt to keep literal accuracy and communicate in the language of the transmitter.
- DE, also known as thought-for-thought translation, places greater emphasis on conveying the thought or meaning of a passage than in reproducing the exact words of the original text. DE sacrifices transparency to the actual Hebrew or Greek words in an attempt to more clearly communicate in the language of the receiver.
There are advocates for both translation philosophies and much of the inherent conflict of talking about Bible translations is rooted in which approach you prefer. In reality, no translation is pure FE or DE and there is always a compromise between the approaches, giving way in recent time to terms like “essentially literal” (ESV) and “optimal equivalence” (HCSB).
However, none of these approaches has satisfactorily addressed issues related to accurately conveying the deeper literary patterns of the source texts. In his article, ‘Lost in Translation: A Plea for “Ouch!” Level Referential Accuracy‘, John Hobbins writes:
My basic beef with FE (formal equivalence) translations: they fool people into thinking they have the real McCoy, when they often have little more than a code that still must be deciphered. My basic beef with DE (dynamic equivalence) translations: they aim too low. Why not strive for dynamic equivalence at the rhetorical, stylistic, and metaphorical levels? [...] To my mind, that means it becomes risky to replace a metaphor in the original language text with an abstraction or mere proposition in translation. Find a DE metaphor, please.
Wayne Leman followed up with this comment:
Amen!! That’s where I’m at, also, John. Many DE translations are too wimpy. They do not do justice to the gutsy rhetoric of the biblical language texts. It takes hard work to create translations which are crisp with real English idiomatic language such as your “talk the talk and walk the walk” as well as reflecting the genre and co-textual relationships of the texts. It *is* possible to have our rhetorical cake and eat it, too, but it has seldom been done, partly out of lack of understanding, but also because it takes so much more effort.
John elsewhere wrote that he prefers “using a translation that strives for formal, semantic, and stylistic equivalence as the same time – a translation that is as literal as possible and as free as necessary. I wedge the word ’semantic’ between ‘formal’ and ’stylistic’ to make a point: a text’s semantic organization cannot be divorced from its formal or stylistic features.”
Perhaps, rather than trying to pigeon this into the existing DE or FE camps, it’s time for a new translational acronym: LE (no, David, LE does not stand for “linga-equivalence”).
LE, that is, Literary Equivalence. A LE translation, to adapt a well-known phrase (which John uses above), is as literary as possible and as free as necessary. To be “literary” means to respect the color, shade, tone, texture, rhythm, pacing, disposition, and structure of the original language; semantic quotations, echoes and parodies of other words are respected; alliteration, metaphors, repetition and other linguistic constructs are preserved to demonstrate the semantic relationships in the original languages (HT: Richard Pevear)
Lingamish had previously posited two maxims about literary translation:
- A truly literary translation will suggest the foreignness of the original without being incomprehensible.
- A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not.
I would add that a literary equivalent translation will also respect any oral aspects of the texts. If a text has an inherent rhythm and pacing for being read out loud, then those characteristics need to be preserved rather flattened into prose or doggerel poetry.
* * *
For more discussion and examples of literary translation, see here, here, here and especially here. I realize that I’m quite late to the party on this topic, but hopefully can still glean a few bits of barley in and among the sheaves.
10 Comments
This is a very interesting conversation, and certainly the sort of thing I’d like to see. It’s not the first time I’ve run into this idea, either. In 1992, for example, John Barton did a comparative review of the REB and NRSV that touches on this issue. (It’s in the Journal of Theological Studies Vol. 43, p. 545-550; I could send you a copy if you don’t have access to it.)
Andrew, I would be very interested in seeing a copy of that REB/NRSV article – any chance that you have it electronically or can scan it? You can email me at [ elshaddai dot edwards at gmail dot com ].
ElShaddai
I would also like to read that article if it’s possible.
It can be downloaded from Oxford Journals if you have a subscription through an academic library. Otherwise, you can find my e-mail address on my webpage if you’d like me to send you a copy. This is probably the most relevant bit:
——————-
Indeed it may be that the attempt to translate the whole Bible into a uniformly modern English is doomed to failure from the start, for modern English simply lacks some registers which this enterprise requires. The hardest passages of all to render into ‘modern’ English are those which are consciously archaizing in the original. Thus I cannot believe that the twenty-four elders in Rev. 11: 17 said: ‘O Lord God, sovereign over all, you are and you were; we give you thanks because you have assumed full power and entered upon your reign.’ Such passages require a translation that recalls the Psalms; but of course the Psalms have been accorded the same flattening-out treatment.
One answer would be to employ different registers for different books. No modern translation known to me has ever attempted this, but the convergence of traditional and self-consciously modern versions ought to make it possible. One might get the right impression if one read the NRSV or even the RSV for Psalms and Revelation, and for passages such as Luke 1—2, and the REB for the Pauline epistles. There is little evidence that translation panels pay much attention to questions of register, partly no doubt because their brief is to write in ‘modern’ English and avoid obscurity. The NRSV comes somewhere near it with its note (p. xv) comparing
This particular distinction is unfortunately now unfamiliar to many English speakers – already in 1901 the Fowlers wrote: ‘It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen … is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it’. But it is a strength of the NRSV that it is aware of such things, and a pity it did not take the matter further. (Barton 548)
Andrew, thanks very much for passing the file along. I found this quote (just before the passage you cited) to be particularly interesting as well:
Also, part of Barton’s conclusion:
I’ve written before that the REB’s translation of Paul was the first version I’ve read where many of the threads of logic made sense or were at least understandable. The willingness to translate multiple verses into a single unit bears much fruit.
That implies that if the original is not literary at all, a literary translation should not be literary. So I think we have an oxymoron here!
Well, some might argue that the point is moot because the original Bible text is literary. I would deny that of much of the Bible, in any meaningful sense of the word “literary”. The Gospel of Mark, for example, is not literary in style, nor in intent; the only meaningful sense in which it is literary is that it has been considered so by some literary critics, judged as if it were literary and found wanting. Similarly, Paul’s letter to Philemon is not “literary” but a personal letter. So, to use the term “literary translation” for Bible translation seems to imply either the false assumption that the original is literary or, in violation of Lingamish’s principle which I quoted above, an attempt to distort a text which was not originally literary into a translation which is.
Thanks for the thoughts, Peter. I guess I meant “literary” in the sense that a LE translation philosophy would attempt to reproduce the innate characteristics of the original, regardless of how simple or sophisticated the original language is. I do not mean “literary” in the sense of highbrow art.
So, yes, Mark should be translated with simple and straightforward language. The letter to Philemon should sound like a personal letter. By having this diversity of literary styles in one translation, we can perhaps come a little closer to understanding the rich range of authorship of the Bible – not just a broad flattening into eighth-grade English.
This is one of my real frustrations. I’ve always understood DE to mean what you label as LE, assuming that an LE will be non-literary when the original text is non-literary.
I’d argue that the notion of DE as “dumbed down”, is not what Nida had in mind at all. Granted they simplified the language of the TEV/GNB which was (is?) touted as a DE translation, but that was to make it accessible to non-native speakers, something not possible at all with a FE translation. In my mind the association of DE with simplification is a mistake.
I’ve always understood that a proper application of DE is not only to be referentially accurate but also to match the “effect” of the passage on the target language speakers to that which the original had on the speakers of the source language. (Sorry about quoting effect, but I don’t want to go through a full discussion of speech act theory to get to talk about illocutionary and perlocutionary force. If you know what all that means, that’s what I intend by “effect”.)
Thanks for the comments, Rich. It’s interesting how DE has been reframed as a simpler translation style for kids, non-native English speakers, etc. Maybe because we don’t have any examples of high reading level DE translations, other than maybe the REB and NJB, which are hardly known outside their limited circles. Especially since proponents of the T/NIV are quick to point out that theirs is *not* a DE translation, but has many aspects of FE. Then there’s the “P” word: paraphrase, which has a hard time being taken seriously.
Maybe what is framed here as “LE” really does get back to the conceptual roots of DE, but if so, has there ever been a true DE translation?
EE, I’m coming back to this post because I was reminded of it as I read the chapter “The Importance of Literary Style” by Calvin D. Linton in The Making of the NIV edited by Kenneth Barker. There’s definitely some common ground, and you might find the article interesting.
In fact, I’ve recently picked up all three copies of Kenneth Barker’s trilogy on the NIV published in the nineties: The Making of the NIV, The Accuracy of the NIV, and The Balance of the NIV. I don’t know if you have these volumes but having just really discovered them, they are a goldmine of insight into translation in general as well as the historical place of the NIV (a translation I always neglected, but appreciate a bit more now). They’re all out of print but can be picked up cheaply used through Amazon.