Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Peter Kirk wrote:

> This is a good example. A sophisticated and highly educated reader may
> realise that they need to work on figuring out the meaning in context of
> "cleanness of teeth". An ordinary person reading this, with limited
> understanding of the background, will not realise that there is a
> problem but will understand it according to their own context and
> presuppositions. And, within a western society, their first thought will
> be that God has blessed his people with a new improved variety of
> toothpaste! What to you and me is an obvious anachronism (although
> presumably even then people may have made some effort to keep their
> teeth clean) is in fact how many people would understand that verse.

There is what I call an implied contract between a translator and
a reader. If a reader purchases a literal style translation the
translators have delivered to him/her a translation which adheres
very closely to the original languages. Part of this implied
contract is that when the reader finds something they don't
understand they will go to the study aids such as commentaries
to find out what it means.

The contract with a DE translation is quite different. Here the
reader has purchased a version in which they expect
the translators will have done the hard work of determining the
meaning and delivering to them the best English equivalent they
can find.

With a paraphrase the contract is -- if you were writing this
today how would you put it.

>This is a misunderstanding of the concept of dynamic equivalence as
>defined by Nida and others. The rendering you call "paraphrase" is from
>TEV which you list as "Dynamic Equivalence". So I think your categories
>have become confused here.

No, they're not confused, you're just pushing the model beyond what it
is capable of doing. I claim my model is useful, not perfect.
My archetypical word-for-word translation, the NASB,
has clear elements of paraphrasing in it and the amount varies from
book to book, the TEV falls back on word-for-word translation from
time to time. But there is no mistaking where these versions *intend*
to sit on the spectrum.

Instead of Leman's system of classification I suggest a better way
is to provide some measure of how well a version delivers on its
implied contract with the reader. I own copies of the NASB, TEV,
and the NIV and I would say the NASB and TEV have delivered very
well on their contracts with the reader. In my opinion the NIV doesn't
do as good a job. However, if a person says ``I want a version which
is reasonably literal but when the going gets tough I want the translators
to help me out'' then the NIV could be a good choice. On my spectrum it
sits in an area where it's incorporated too much DE and paraphrasing
to be considered a true word-for-word translation, but not enough
to make it a true DE version either. Given its popularity either
that is what people actually want or it is what others have told them
they need.


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