Dice el autor (1981 [1973]: 306-7) [las citas son de la traducción española de José Ma Azáceta, García de Albéniz y el mismo autor, Gredos, 1981]:
Una lengua histórica no es nunca un solo sistema lingüístico, sino un diasistema, un conjunto más o menos complejo de «dialectos», «niveles» y estilos de lengua. (...) Normalmente, cada uno de estos sistemas es (más o menos) homogéneo desde un sólo punto de vista: en cada dialecto pueden comprobarse diferencias diastráticas y diafásicas (y, por tanto, niveles y estilos de lengua); en cada nivel, diferencias diatópicas y diafásicas (dialectos y estilos) y en cada estilo, diferencias diatópicas y diastráticas (dialectos y niveles). Además, los límites entre los niveles y los estilos de lengua pueden ser diversos en los distintos dialectos; y los límites entre los estilos, diversos en los distintos niveles.
El País
NECROLÓGICA:'IN
MEMORIAM'
Eugene Nida, traductor y lingüista
La traducción ha
oscilado siempre entre la literalidad y la interpretación ad sensum,
según su sentido. Los textos religiosos casi siempre se han traducido ad
uerbum, pues, por definición, la llamada palabra de Dios no puede someterse
a interpretación. Tyndale, Dolet, Encinas y muchos otros pagaron con la vida la
osadía de traducir los textos bíblicos de manera que se entendieran.
Desde mediados del
siglo XX se ha venido produciendo una verdadera revolución, pues no solo no se
quema a nadie por traducir la Biblia, sino tampoco por hacerlo de modo que el
vulgo pueda entender su discurso (si no sus arcanos). Cientos y hasta miles de
millones de habitantes del planeta pueden leer hoy ese libro en su lengua de
cada día, aunque ignoren que es gracias al empeño de un hombre del que
seguramente nunca han oído hablar: Eugene Nida (Oklahoma, EE UU, 1914),
fallecido el 25 de agosto.
Formado en
Clásicas, Teología y Lingüística y ordenado sacerdote baptista, pronto se
preguntó por qué si el Nuevo Testamento se escribió en koiné, la lengua
común griega, su versión en las lenguas contemporáneas se envolvía en un
lenguaje rancio, huero y a menudo ininteligible.
A cargo de las
traducciones de la Bible Society of America, durante medio siglo formó a
traductores nativos de casi doscientas lenguas, sobre todo del Tercer Mundo,
para ofrecer traducciones adaptadas a sus culturas.
Entrelazando
disciplinas (lingüística, sociosemiótica, antropología, lexicología, teoría de
la comunicación), Nida establece el principio de la "equivalencia dinámica
(o funcional)", es decir, el equilibrio entre la comprensión del contexto
del original y su correlato en la lengua traducida, teniendo siempre en cuenta
los parámetros culturales del lector.
Según este
principio, la traducción correcta en algunas lenguas africanas de "Ama al
Señor con todo tu corazón" sería "Ama al Señor con todo tu
hígado", ya que sus hablantes sitúan en este órgano la sede de los
sentimientos. Para algunos fundamentalistas esto es anatema y a veces se ha
tachado a Nida hasta de hereje.
La pujanza de las
teorías de Nida y su intensa labor de campo no solo beneficiaron a lenguas
indígenas o minoritarias, algunas de las cuales se alfabetizaron o pudieron
forjar ciertas identidades (como el fenómeno de la teología de la liberación),
sino que marcaron también la traducción de la Good News Bible (1976),
realizada en inglés para lectores no nativos, que ha superado los 200 millones
de ejemplares.
Propició la edición
de los textos hebreo y griego de ambos Testamentos (publicados por las
Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas), inigualables por sus exhaustivas exégesis e
imprescindibles hoy para cualquier traductor de la Biblia. Como lo es el
diccionario bíblico semántico que diseñó con el mismo fin.
Durante medio siglo
visitó 80 países, impartiendo conferencias y seminarios, escribió 40 libros
(entre ellos obras señeras como Towards a Science of Translating y, con
Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation) y numerosos artículos,
siempre en un estilo claro, simple y conciso. Fundó dos revistas, Practical
Anthropology y The Bible Translator, y su labor continúa en el
instituto que lleva su nombre en la Bible Society.
Pronto se vio que
la idea nidiana de traducción era aplicable a cualquier tipo de textos y se le
adaptó de mil maneras. Pero por encima de todo el maremágnum de teorías de la
traducción destaca inconfundible y clara la suya.
Este gran teórico
escribía: "A los mejores traductores les sobran todas las teorías".
Para él la traducción no era teoría, sino oficio, artesanía. Solía contar que,
cuando su equipo estaba traduciendo la Biblia en Japón, le preguntaron:
"¿Y si ahora se entiende, qué harán los predicadores?".
Se va un gran
pensador de la traducción, pero también un hombre generosísimo, bondadoso,
sencillo, cortés, que cultivaba rosas en su jardín y amistades por donde iba.
Hablaba español, que aprendió en México, y otra media docena de lenguas. Murió
con 96 años en su casa de Madrid, horas antes de recibir las pruebas de su
último libro.
Pollux Hernúñez es traductor.
The
Telegraph
01 Sept 2011
The Reverend Eugene Nida
Linguist who translated
the Bible into hundreds of tongues, taking its message from the ice cap to the
desert.
He
believed that translators could arrive at the most accurate meaning of a
particular Greek word by first examining all other uses of that word in
Scripture and then determining which meaning fits best in a specific verse. His
(along with J.P. Louw) Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on
Semantic Domains applies this theory, and is considered a standard lexicon
for New Testament word studies.
His might not be a
household name, but Nida’s work and ideas had a lasting influence on many of
the Bibles on our bookshelves. He helped translate the Bible into more than 200 languages,
enabling the world's most popular book to be understood by remote populations
from the icy wastes of the Arctic Circle to the deserts of Africa.
Key to his work was the
concept of "functional equivalence". Instead of using literal
translations, his idea was to incorporate native culture and idiom into the
Bible story. Using this system, translators could rearrange sentences in the
Bible to convey more clearly its meaning and intention in any given language.
Nida travelled far and
wide, visiting more than 85 countries to recruit native speakers to help with
translations. His longest project, begun in 1978, was to translate the Bible
into Inuktitut, the tongue spoken by the Inuit people who live in the Arctic;
it took 24 years to complete.
This was because the Bible
story is set among palm trees, olive groves and sandy deserts and features
donkeys, cattle and goats, none of which makes sense to the Inuit, who live
amid vast expanses of snow and are more familiar with seals and walruses. As
Nida explained: "You can't translate without cultural context."
He also helped write the
Good News Bible, applying his system to break down large words into smaller,
clearer ideas. So, for example, the word "multitude" became
"crowd," "covetous" became "greedy", and
"take heed" became "watch out".
Though such changes
rankled with believers who revel in the beauty and rolling cadences of the King
James Version, Nida was unfazed. To him, the key to the Bible was not poetry,
but comprehension. The sole aim, he insisted, should be "to read it, to
understand it and be transformed by its message. Meaning is found not in
dictionaries, grammars and encyclopedias, nor in texts nor even in contexts,
but in our heads."
Eugene Albert Nida was
born on November 11 1914 in Oklahoma City, where his father was a chiropractor.
When he was five, the family moved to California, and while studying Latin in
high school Eugene was already anticipating being able to translate Scripture
as a missionary.
He duly graduated in Greek
and Latin at the University of California at Los Angeles, and in 1939 received
a Master's degree in New Testament Greek from the University of Southern
California.
In 1943 he was ordained as
a Baptist minister and in the same year earned a doctorate in Linguistics from
the University of Michigan. He also joined the American Bible Society, becoming
head of its translation programme three years later.
Though Nida was a prolific
linguist, fluent in at least eight languages, he needed a system to understand
the languages of many peoples around the world. His technique was to point to
something on the ground and ask locals what they called it. This way, he
explained, the word was not a literal translation but a reflection of their
culture.
He would then compile a
vocabulary and incorporate his understanding of the language and culture into
his translations. But he was not vain about his efforts. "There is no such
thing as a definitive translation, since there are constant advances in
Biblical scholarship as well as changes in all living languages," Nida
once said. "No major translation should last more than 50 years."
He retired from the
American Bible Society in the early 1990s, but remained busy, conferring with
translators around the world. He wrote more than 40 books on languages,
translations and Bible scholarship.
Although the Bible's
origins date back more than 2,000 years, Nida believed that the book had an
enduring relevance. "People are discovering that the Bible has a
significant message for the present day," he said. "While this is an
age of technology, urbanisation and change, the world hasn't invented a new sin
in 2,000 years."
Eugene Nida, who died on
August 25, 2011,was predeceased in 1993 by his wife of 49 years, Althea
Sprague. He is survived by his second wife, Elena Fernandez-Miranda of
Brussels, a translator and interpreter, whom he married in 1997.
The
New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: September 3,
2011
The Rev. Eugene A. Nida, a linguist and
Baptist minister who spurred a Babel of Bibles, recruiting and training native
speakers to translate Scripture into a host of languages around the world, died
on Aug. 25 at his home in Madrid. He was 96.
The American Bible
Society, his longtime employer, announced the death. Mr. Nida, who also had a
home in Brussels, had lived in Europe in retirement.
Widely considered
the father of modern Bible translation, Mr. Nida (pronounced NYE-duh) was for
four decades the head of the Bible society’s translation program. He
was known in particular for developing an approach to translation — and a
method of training translators — that has influenced translators of religious
and secular literature.
What defined Mr.
Nida’s work was his insistence that Bible translations be accessible to the
people for whom they were intended. After joining the Bible society in 1943, he
visited scores of countries, where he recruited native speakers and trained
them as translators.
Previously, most
Bible translations had been done by Western missionaries, who rarely had great
familiarity with the local language. Not surprisingly, the word-for-word
translations that resulted were often stiff, unpalatable and largely
inaccessible.
“The genius of Nida
was that he also developed a pedagogical approach,” Philip C. Stine, the author
of a biography, “Let the Words Be Written: The Lasting Influence of Eugene A.
Nida,” said in a telephone interview on Friday. “You could take people with very
unsophisticated linguistic backgrounds and actually train them, using Nida’s
methods.”
Drawing on
linguistics, anthropology and communication science, Mr. Nida devised an
approach to translation known as “dynamic equivalence.” (It was later called
“functional equivalence.”)
Dynamic equivalence
was intended to produce translations that read naturally, were rooted in the
local idiom and yet retained fealty to the original Scripture. The approach,
which took as its starting point Hebrew and Greek biblical texts, centered,
quite literally, on the art of faithful adaptation.
Traversing the
globe by plane, train and canoe, Mr. Nida set in motion the painstaking process
of translating Scripture into more than 200 languages, among them Navajo;
Tagalog and Ilocano, spoken in the Philippines; Quechua, an indigenous language
of Peru; Hmong, spoken in Southeast Asia; and
Inuktitut, an indigenous language of the Canadian Arctic.
Mr. Nida also
played an active role in creating the Good News Bible, a colloquial
English-language edition produced by the Bible society and published in two
volumes — the New Testament in 1966, and the combined Old and New Testaments in
1976.
Sometimes
criticized for its linguistic simplicity (“Behold the fowls of the air,” for
instance, became “Look at the birds flying around”), the Good News Bible was
originally intended for speakers of English as a second language. Embraced in
unanticipated droves by native English speakers, it has sold millions of
copies.
Eugene Albert Nida
was born in Oklahoma City on Nov. 11, 1914. He earned a bachelor’s degree in
classics from the University of California, Los Angeles, followed by a master’s
from the University of Southern California in New Testament Greek. In 1943, he
earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Michigan and was also
ordained as a minister.
One of his first
tasks at the Bible society, as he recounted in a memoir, “Fascinated by
Languages” (2003), was evaluating a translation of the Gospel of Mark into
Yipounou, a language of Gabon, in West Africa.
In linguistics, Mr.
Nida did important early work in morphology, which studies the internal
architecture of words.
Mr. Nida’s first
wife, Althea Sprague, died before him. His survivors include his second wife,
Elena Fernandez-Miranda, and stepchildren. Information on other survivors was
not available.
Translated back into English, some of the Bible passages produced using Mr. Nida’s method yield a resonant poetry. As The New York Times reported in a 1955 article about his work, “ ‘I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’ ”
Translated back into English, some of the Bible passages produced using Mr. Nida’s method yield a resonant poetry. As The New York Times reported in a 1955 article about his work, “ ‘I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’ ”
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