本來只是一篇,但放上 WebCT 時發現太長,所以分成兩篇。第一篇主要記下上課聽到的和一些推想,第二篇講聖經信息本。第一篇:
Subject Recap; D-E & PoT
Posted on Monday, October 24, 2005 4:30pm
I am not sure if i have understood Eugene Nida's Dynamic Equivalance correctly. In the diagrams:
S1 - M1 - R1 or S1 - M1 - R1S2 (translator) - M2 - R2
instead of comparing M1 with M2, his theory compares M1-R1 with M2-R2, or simply R1 with R2. One of the guidelines in D-E is using the target language "just the way we would say it".
His theory, however, suffers a major problem that the scope of readers can never be confined. Each translator would have a particular group of people he or she wants to reach. It can only work in Nida's Bible translation, as the only aim of such translation is to spread the gospel. On top of this, we also do not have objective rules to compare R1 and R2.
On the other hand, extreme D-E-typed translation doesn't work either, as proved by Nida's failing attempt in translating the Bible into a New York style one.
Another idea Nida proposed is the Process of Translating, in which we firstly deconstruct the (source language) surface sentences into (source language) kernel sentences, then translate them into (target language) equivalent kernel sentences, finally reconstruct the (target language) surface sentences.
Are these two ideas connected in some way? As Prof Wong pointed out, even if we are able to do the deconstruction in a so-called scientific way, we cannot reconstruct the kenels back to surface without referring back to the source text. This means the effort we pay during the "process" is wasted.
But are there any other possibilities? If we put the "commentary / criticism" thing aside for a moment (i.e. we are not concerned how accurate the translation is; after all, we don't have any benchmarks or standards), can we reconstruct the kernels in the way we want to? Since we are quite sure we fully understand the source text (as we have already deconstructed the source text into kernels), we should be able to reconstruct them -- the result text may be nowhere similar to the original (that's why i put the commentary aside), but R2 could still remain the same as R1. (Though this process is no longer scientific.) And this looks pretty close to what the Dynamic Equivalence is after.