Eugene Nida discusses several principles of translation. There are no perfect translations between languages as there is no complete correspondence. Translations can be either formal/literal or free/paraphrased. Key factors in translating include the message, author purpose, and audience. Formal equivalence focuses on form and content correspondence while dynamic equivalence focuses on equivalent impact and natural expression in the receptor language. Cultural and linguistic distance also impact translation difficulty.

1. Eugene Nida
Principles of Correspondence

2. • Nida there are not two same languages as
there is no correspondence between
languages, so the result is that there can
not be fully exact translations.

3. Different types of translations
• Free or paraphrastic, close or literal
translations.
 There are also ultraliteral translations as
interlinears; but others may involve highly
concordant relationships, e.g. the same SL
word is always translated by only one
word in receptor-language word.

4. • Three different basic factors in translating
• 1. the nature of the message,
• 2. the purpose of the author and, by
proxy, of translator, and
• 3. the type of audience

5. The nature of the message
• Content and form takes the higher consideration
in the message. In most cases content and form
goes hand in hand with each other, but
sometimes content takes the primary
consideration or visa versa form takes the
primary considerations. And very rarely they can
be produced in a translation, so form in most
cases is sacrificed for the sake of content.

6. The purpose of the author and, by
proxy, of translator
• Translator’s purpose is similar to that of
the original author. Another one may be
information about the content and
form, or this may not be enough he might
want to make his translation meaningful
into TL for example by translation idioms
with their exact meaning in TL not
translating them word by word.

7. The type of audience
• The decoding ability of the audience
should be important. Nida points four
principal levels in decoding abliity in any
language: 1. the capacity of children, 2.
the double-standard capacity of new
literates, 3 the capacity of the average
literate adult, 4. the usually high capacity
of specialists
(doctors, theologians, philosophers, scienti
sts, etc.).

8. Two basic orientations in
translating
• Formal equivalence
• Dynamic equivalence

9. Formal equivalence
• The attention is on the message, both in form
and content. In this translation the translator is
concerned with such correspondence as poetry
to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept to
concept. The message of the receptor language
should be compared to the source language
message as in this way it can determine
standards of accuracy and correctness.

10. • In this type of translation the translator
tries to reproduces as literally and
meaningfully as possible the form and
content of the original.

11. Dynamic equivalence
• It is focused more on “the principle of equivalent effect”
• The translator is not focused on the matching the
message of the receptor language to that of the source
language. But he is more concerned with the dynamic
relationship between receptor and message as it was to
the original receptors and the message. The translator
tries to uses a complete natural expressions of his own
language making the message of the text
comprehensible to the reader even though he might not
understand the patterns of the source-language.

12. Linguistic and Cultural distance
• Languages and cultures can be closely related
for example Hebrew and Arabic. And when
translating from one to another a translator
might not expect to have lots of problems, but
he most pay attention to false friends, even if
languages are related they may have only
superficial similarities.
• Languages aren’t the same even though they
belong to the same language family but their
culture is very different, e.g. German and
Hungarian.

13. Definitions of translating
• There are a lot of translation definitions
because a vast number of people
undertook to discuss the same subject.
Also the differences in the material
translated and the audience are different.

14. Principles governing a translation
oriented toward formal equivalence
• F-E is basically source oriented in both the
form and content.
• And it attempts to reproduce formal
elements: 1 grammatical units, 2
consistency in word usage, 3 meaning in
terms of source context.

15. Grammatical Unites
• A) translating nouns by nouns, verbs by
verbs, etc,; b) keeping all phrases and
sentences intact, c) preserving all formal
indicators, e.g. marks of
punctuation, paragraph breaks, and poetic
indentation.

16. Consistency in word usage
• F-E translation usually aims at so-called
concordance of terminology; that is, a
source term in render by the
corresponding term in receptor document.

17. Meaning in terms of source context
• To produce meaning F-E doesn’t change
anything not even in translating idioms
when we translate them literally.

18. Principles governing translations
oriented toward dynamic
equivalence
• D-E is not concerned with source
message, but with the receptor response.
In D-E translations we attempt to make
our translation sound as if it were written
in our own language. But the our
translation most reflect the meaning and
the intent of the source text.

19. • Nida defined D-E as the closest natural
equivalent to the source-language
message. This definition contains three
terms: 1. equivalence, which points
toward the source-language message, 2.
natural, which points toward the receptor
language, and 3. closest, which binds the
two orientations together on the basis of
the highest degree of approximation.