The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation
Leland Ryken, C. John Collins

Price: $15.99 (Trade Paperback)

Availability: Usually ships within 2-3 business days

Since the Bible is God's holy Word, translators have a heavy responsibility to provide accurate and reliable translations. Leland Ryken asserts that Bible translation should be essentially literal--any translation violating how language is dealt with in everyday life as well as in scholarly pursuits cannot be based on the right theory. Ryken describes the translation principles that make for reliable English Bible translation, looks at common translation fallacies, and offers principles for good translation. He probes the theological, ethical, and hermeneutical issues involved and surveys difficulties with modern translations.

Product Details

• ISBN-10: 1581344643
• ISBN-13: 9781581344646
• Format: Trade Paperback
• Pages: 336

• Size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
• Published: Nov 12, 2002

---

More Information

• Description
• Contents
• Excerpt: Preface and Introduction: The Current Debate About Bible Translation

Excerpt

Preface

This book has as its purpose to define the translation principles that make for the best English Bible translation. My project began as an assessment of English translations from the perspective of literary criteria. The scope then broadened to include as many of the issues involved in Bible translation as a short book would allow.

My own expertise is as a literary critic, not as an expert in translation theory. Far from disqualifying me from writing on the topic of translation theory, my literary orientation allows light to fall from a new angle. The Bible is a written document that obeys the rules of literary discourse at every turn. A narrowly focused linguistic approach to translation has often lost sight of larger literary principles, and part of my project has been to reintroduce those principles into the discussion of English Bible translation. To anticipate one of the main emphases of this book, any translation theory that consistently violates how we deal with literary texts and the discourses of everyday life cannot be the right theory.

My discussion occurs within a current debate about translation theory, and I will be forthright in positioning myself in the debate. Dynamic equivalent Bibles have had the field to themselves for the past half century. The tenets of dynamic equivalency are so firmly entrenched that I have repeatedly found people to be incredulous that anyone would not accept dynamic equivalency as an axiom. I do not accept it as an axiom, and in fact I have never been favorably impressed by dynamic equivalent translations at the levels of either content or style. Until recently my resistance was based on literary intuitions.

Having served on the translation committee for the English Standard Version, I gradually came to a deeper understanding of why I found most modern translations lacking. This book articulates the understanding that I have reached about a variety of translation issues. I did not set out to defend the essentially literal theory of translation. I began with the question of what principles should govern what we do with written texts. On the basis of that inquiry, I ended with a belief that only an essentially literal translation of the Bible can achieve sufficiently high standards in terms of literary criteria and fidelity to the original text. Concomitantly, I have ended with a deep-seated distrust of how dynamic equivalent translations treat the biblical text.

By an essentially literal translation I do not mean one that renders the original text so literally as to be incomprehensible to English readers. The syntax must be English rather than Hebrew or Greek, and idioms that are incomprehensible to English readers need to be rendered in terms of meaning rather than literal equivalence. But within the parameters of these necessary deviations from the original, an essentially literal translation applies the same rules as we expect from a published text in its original language: The author’s own words are reproduced, figurative language is retained instead of explained, and stylistic features and quirks of the author are allowed to stand as the author expressed them.

While my purpose is thus partly polemical, I want to record my respect for people and translators who come down on the other side of the issue. I believe that their translation theory has done damage to the biblical text that English-speaking readers have at their disposal, but at the same time I want to acknowledge that modern translations have been widely used for good. I believe that there is a place for a range of Bible translations, including children’s Bibles and Bible paraphrases. My subject in this book is what constitutes the best Bible for English-speaking people and serious students of the Bible, and also for the English-speaking church as a body. If at points I record my dismay over modern trends in Bible translation, it is safe to assume that the disagreement that exists between my position and the rival position is mutual, with parties on both sides equally convinced of the rightness of their own position and the wrongness of the alternate position. In this book I have articulated a position that needs to be aired precisely because it is a less visible position in a debate of which the general public is scarcely aware. Indeed, the average reader of the English Bible is ignorant of rival translation theories and of how much has been lost and changed from the original text in most modern translations.

A final clarification that I wish to make is that my topic is English Bible translation for English-speaking readers. I am not qualified to theorize about the difficulties of translating the Bible into foreign languages for members of non-Western cultures. I leave it to others to consider how the principles set forth in this book might affect translation of the Bible into other languages for other cultures.

I wish to record my gratitude to the scholars who critiqued my manuscript and spared me from dozens of follies and infelicities: Jack Collins, Lane Dennis, Philip Ryken, Ray Van Leeuwen, and Dennis Zaderaka.

Introduction: The Current Debate About Bible Translation

My aim in this introduction is to establish a context for the analysis of contemporary Bible translation theory and practice that is the focus of the book as a whole. I propose to briefly sketch the state of Bible translation for the past fifty years, to suggest what I think is happening currently, and to situate myself in the current debate about what constitutes the best theory of English Bible translation.

The Context of the Debate: Bible Translation for the Past Half Century

As I will show in a chapter devoted to the history of English Bible translation, a seismic shift in translation theory and practice occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Up to that point, most English Bible translations had operated on the premise that the task of English Bible translation was to reproduce the words of the original in the words of the receptor language. Accuracy of translation took precedence over literary style, though compared to modern colloquial translations, it seems from our viewpoint that literary beauty was still accorded a very high position. Certainly dignity and relative formality of language and syntax prevailed.

The person who almost single-handedly changed the course of English Bible translation was Eugene Nida, who championed his theory of “dynamic equivalence.” This theory was first introduced by Nida in the mid-twentieth century. Briefly stated, the theory of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation emphasizes the reaction of the reader to the translated text, rather than the translation of the words and phrases themselves. In simplest terms, dynamic equivalence is often referred to as “thought for thought” translation as compared to “essentially literal” translation (for more on these terms, see the end of this chapter).

The impetus for Nida’s theory of dynamic equivalence was his work as a foreign missionary and transcultural Bible translator. Once Nida and his colleagues had formulated their theory of dynamic equivalence, it seemed natural to carry over the same principles as were used for translation into newly discovered languages to the task of translating the Bible into the long-established English language. This is highly significant. In my view, much more thought should have been given to whether translation into the English language—a language in which the Bible had become almost a native book—should follow the same ground rules that prevailed with languages that had just been reduced to an alphabet and written form. It was the apparently automatic carryover of translation practices designed for newly emerging languages to English translation that has had such a deleterious effect on the course of English Bible translation. It is not too much to say that the English Bible had become so familiar to English-speaking Christians (and even cultured non-Christians) that it never seemed foreign until a steady diet of dynamic equivalent translations weaned readers away from the King James tradition.

While I do not believe that Nida’s theories would have been sufficient of themselves to turn the tide in English Bible translation, I do wish to acknowledge the extraordinary energy with which Nida pursued his vision as he published numerous books, introductions, and essays. Although I believe that Nida’s influence on English Bible translation has been, on balance, negative, depriving current Bible readers of the Bible they need, I nonetheless admire his passion for Bible translation and the scholarly rigor that he brought to the task.

If Nida’s influence is not what accounts for the dominance of dynamic equivalent translations today, what does? The current hegemony flowed from two landmark translations based on dynamic equivalence principles. They were The Living Bible, a paraphrase published in 1971, and the New International Version (NIV), published in 1978. While a changing philosophy of translation may have provided the platform for these English Bibles, the way in which they took the evangelical world by storm can be explained at least partly by the cultural trends that coincided with their appearance and that almost guaranteed their success. Before I note the cultural trends that helped both translations, I need to note a crucial difference between them. The Living Bible won its own way as a populist, grassroots success story. The NIV, by contrast, was a triumph of modern public relations and marketing strategy, as representatives from all possible denominations and organizations were deployed in the translation process and as celebrities endorsed the new translation. (I particularly remember an advertisement featuring a seated athlete with a stadium in the background, telling the world that he enjoyed reading the NIV.)

A partial list of cultural forces that paved the way for the triumph of dynamic equivalent Bibles in the 1970s includes these:

• a lack of other alternatives to the King James Bible at a time when the latter was badly showing its age and had become culturally obsolete with its archaic language and deficient scholarship (the RSV might have become the accepted alternative but was shunned as a theologically liberal translation);
• an antiestablishment and antitraditional spirit that welcomed translations that seemed novel and modern (an unconventional Bible was automatically preferred to a traditional one among many evangelicals);
• a loss of appreciation for, or even ability to recognize, literary excellence;
• a new preference for colloquialism over formality in written discourse (perhaps an outgrowth of literary realism);
• evangelistic zeal, accompanied by a pragmatic outlook that endorsed whatever religious materials produced the most conversions;
• a consumer-oriented and Gallup poll mentality that led translators and publishers to give readers what they wanted (the “target audience” mentality);
• a general laziness that has increasingly resulted in an obsession with making virtually all pursuits, including Bible reading, easy;
• new marketing techniques that could appeal to target markets (and that could eventually package “niche Bibles” for specific market groups);
• a narcissistic cultural orientation that elevated the reader rather than the author or text to center stage in the reading process (in dynamic equivalence theory, the reader reigns, a view that came into vogue simultaneously with the triumph of reader-response literary theory).

To offer reasons for the sudden popularity of dynamic equivalent translations does not by itself render them illegitimate. It only serves as a caution against an easy assumption that their popularity proves their superiority. I myself believe that English Bible translation took a wrong turn in the second half of the twentieth-century, spurred by certain cultural forces rather than correct translation principles.

For the last three decades, dynamic equivalent translations have had the world of English Bible translation and the English Bible market pretty much to themselves, though I find that laypeople generally do not realize this. Even in the scholarly world, there is some confusion regarding the NIV, which one source incorrectly places in the “verbal equivalence” category.¹ Ray Van Leeuwen rightly says that “if you read a Bible translated in the last half-century, you probably read a Bible influenced by Nida.”²

During the past half century, there have, indeed, been many Bible readers and scholars who resisted the trend and were unhappy with the dominance of dynamic equivalence theory and practice, but they lacked an organized voice and had no genuine alternative to The Living Bible and the NIV until the publication of the English Standard Version (ESV) in 2001. (I recall reading a review of two books devoted to criticizing the NIV that dismissed the books with the comment that their criticisms, though largely true, were irrelevant because the authors could not point to an adequate alternative to the NIV.) Some of those unhappy with dynamic equivalent translations resisted the times by individually using the New American Standard Bible (NASB) and the Revised Standard Version (RSV), but their resistance had little public visibility. (I myself was surprised and pleased to learn, when I joined the ESV Translation Committee, about evangelical luminaries who had remained closet RSV people for three decades, as had I.)

The Beginnings of Current Debate

There are currently intimations of a countermovement. The old standby among essentially literal translations, the NASB, was reissued in 1995. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, 1990), even though it made the shift to dynamic equivalence, was an attempt to compete with the NIV. The newest English translation, the English Standard Version, is an essentially literal Bible in the King James tradition of fidelity to the original text and commitment to literary excellence. The Holman Christian Standard Bible, still in process, “seeks to provide a translation as close to the words of the Hebrew and Greek texts as possible” (preface).

In the realm of biblical scholarship, too, voices of discontent with dynamic equivalence are beginning to be heard, for example, at the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). From the time that I gave the NIV a negative review (in 1978) for its literary deficiencies,³ I have never wavered in my negative assessment of it; but until I served on a Bible translation committee I lacked the expertise fully to understand why my literary intuitions told me that dynamic equivalent translations were inferior. As I was in the process of codifying my objections, I was influenced by a dissertation criticizing Eugene Nida’s translation theory.⁴

Although I had formulated the basic position I develop in this book as early as 2000,⁵ I subsequently found a kindred spirit in biblical scholar Ray Van Leeuwen, who is much more expert in specialized scholarship than I am and whose outstanding writing on the subject is a good complement to what I attempt in this book.⁶ Van Leeuwen believes that dynamic equivalent translations have “made it more difficult for English readers to know what the Bible actually said,” and that “we need an up-to-date translation that is more transparent to the original languages.”

Other voices of objection are also beginning to appear. The title of one scholarly article sounds the keynote: “Modern English Bible Versions as a Problem for the Church.”⁷ Y. C. Whang, weighing the question of whether a Bible translator is responsible to the author or the reader, concludes that Nida’s “new criteria for translation are . . . untenable.”⁸ The general drift of a specialized book on translation and relevance is that dynamic equivalent translations have been unable to deliver on their claims to have successfully communicated the meaning of the original.⁹ D. A. Carson has written critically about the “limits of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation,”¹⁰ and two books have been critical of the results of dynamic equivalency in the NIV.¹¹ Among evangelical Bible scholars I find a growing discontent with the dynamic equivalent tradition in general and the NIV, TNIV, and NLT in particular.

I need to be suitably modest in these claims. The NIV remains the dominant evangelical translation, and the NLT has enjoyed a large circulation. The debate is still in its very early stages. This book is my contribution to the debate. I need to underscore that I began my pilgrimage innocent of the context that I have outlined in this chapter. When I was told, upon joining the ESV Translation Committee as its literary stylist, that the new translation was to be an essentially literal translation, I had no conception of what that meant, and I knew nothing about the rival translation theory. My quest had always been simply to delineate the right criteria for excellence in translation and to assess translations by those criteria.

As I pursued my quest to its logical conclusion, I ended up where I had not envisioned—with a wholehearted defense of essentially literal translations in the King James tradition, and as a critic of dynamic equivalence. This book represents the fruits of my labor. I have written in an awareness that many evangelicals will not agree with me, but that has not dampened my enthusiasm for an essentially literal English Bible that preserves both the accuracy and literary excellence of the great tradition of English Bible translation.

Defining the Terms of the Debate

Before concluding this chapter, I need to define a number of terms that I will be using throughout this book. The crucial terms, which have been current for only half a century, are these:

• Receptor language: the language into which a text written in a foreign language is translated.
• Native language: the original language in which a text is written.
• Dynamic equivalent: a meaning in the receptor language that corresponds to (is “equivalent” to) a meaning in a native-language text (for example, the “heart” as the modern way of denoting the essence of a person, especially the emotions, which for the ancients was situated in the kidneys).
• Dynamic equivalence: a theory of translation based on the premise that whenever something in the native-language text is foreign or unclear to a contemporary reader, the original text should be translated in terms of a dynamic equivalent.
• Functional equivalent: something in the receptor language that differs from what the original text says but that serves the same function in the receptor language (for example, “firstfruits” translated as “special offering”).
• Functional equivalence: a theory of translation that favors replacing a statement in the original text with a functional equivalent whenever the original phraseology or reference is obscure for a modern reader in the receptor language.
• Equivalent effect: a translation that aims to produce the same effect on readers of the translation as the original text produced on its native-language readers.
• Formal equivalence: a theory of translation that favors reproducing the form or language of the original text, and not just its meaning. In its stricter form, this theory of translation espouses reproducing even the syntax and word order of the original; the formulas word for word translation and verbal equivalence often imply this stricter definition of the concept.
• Essentially literal translation: a translation that strives to translate the exact words of the original-language text in a translation, but not in such a rigid way as to violate the normal rules of language and syntax in the receptor language.
• Transparent text: this means two opposite things, and for that very reason I will use this phrase very sparingly, though in the broader world of Bible translation it is common. A text is transparent to the modern or contemporary reader when it is immediately understandable in the receptor language; this is the goal of dynamic equivalent translations. A translation is transparent to the original text when it reproduces the language, expressions, and customs of the original text; this is the goal of an essentially literal translation.

This whole cluster of terms was apparently unknown until the middle of the twentieth century, which in itself tells us much about Bible translation through the centuries and about developments in the last half century. I will use only two of the concepts defined above regularly. I will refer to Bible translations that follow the theory of dynamic equivalence as dynamic equivalent Bibles or (as a variant) dynamic equivalent translations. I will refer to translations based on the attempt to translate the very words of the original text as essentially literal translations. Although the term functional equivalent is in the process of replacing the designation dynamic equivalent, it is less accurate to designate the range of topics that I cover in this book.

Notes

1. Alec Gilmore, A Dictionary of the English Bible and Its Origins (Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000), 176. That the NIV has been somewhat slippery is suggested by Gilmore’s listing as one of the NIV’s “weaknesses” that “it is very literal” and yet claiming that it is “not really a verbal equivalence translation” (118).
2. Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, “We Really Do Need Another Bible Translation,” Christianity Today, October 22, 2001, 29.
3. Leland Ryken, “The Literary Merit of the New International Version,” Christianity Today, October 20, 1978, 16-17.
4. Anthony Howard Nichols, “Translating the Bible: A Critical Analysis of E. A. Nida’s Theory of Dynamic Equivalence and Its Impact Upon Recent Bible Translations,” dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1996.
5. Leland Ryken, “Criteria for Literary Excellence in an English Bible Translation,” address at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Nashville, November 14, 2000.
6. Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, “On Bible Translation and Hermeneutics,” in After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation, eds. Craig Bartholomew et al (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 284-311; “We Really Do Need Another Bible Translation,” 28-35.
7. James Barr, “Modern English Bible Versions as a Problem for the Church,” Quarterly Review 14 (1994): 263-278.
8. Y. C. Whang, “To Whom Is a Translator Responsible—Reader or Author?” in Translating the Bible: Problems and Prospects, eds. Stanley E. Porter and Richard S. Hess (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 46-62.
9. Ernst-august Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
10. D. A. Carson, “The Limits of Dynamic Equivalence in Bible Translation,” Evangelical Review of Theology, July 1985, 200-213. Carson’s statement that “dynamic equivalence has won the day—and rightly so” (10) strikes me as a non sequitur to the rest of his article.
11. Robert P. Martin, Accuracy of Translation and the New International Version: The Primary Criterion in Evaluating Bible Versions (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1989); Earl D. Radmacher and Zane C. Hodges, The NIV Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at a Popular Translation (Dallas: Redención Viva, 1990).

About the Author

Leland Ryken (Ph.D., University of Oregon) is Professor of English at Wheaton College. He has authored or edited several books, including The Word of God in English, The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, and The Complete Literary Guide to the Bible. He is a frequent speaker at the Evangelical Theological Society and served as literary stylist for The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.