Journal of Translation volume 7:1

Editor’s Comments

by David Frank

Again we have three excellent articles on translation theory and practice in this issue of the Journal of Translation with a focus on Bible translation. Glenn Kerr’s “Dynamic Equivalence and It’s Daughters” examines the influence of Eugene Nida’s Dynamic Equivalence translation model, through Functional Equivalence, Meaning-Based Translation, and Optimal Equivalence, and compares this family of equivalence models with others including Relevance Theory, Skopostheorie, and the Frames of Reference model, and also the discipline of Translation Studies. The article “Implicit Aspects of Culture in Source and Target Language Contexts” by Thomas Matthews, Catherine Rountree and Steve Nicolle builds on the “Prototypical Model of Culture for Bible Translation” that Thomas Matthews presented in the Journal of Translation volume 5, number 1 (2009), examining the way both the source and the target language contexts influence how information is appropriately communicated explicitly and implicitly in a text, drawing on translations of the Bible into East African languages for examples. “Overliteralness and Mother-Tongue Translators” by Michael Cahill and Keith Benn show how, without adequate training, translators of the Bible intuitively tend to use an overly literal translation style that can be improved when attention is given to the natural patterns of the target language and a study of how languages are different, especially in terms of discourse and figures of speech.

Eric Kindberg, Diane Dix, Newton Frank and Barbara Shannon contributed to the editing of this issue of the Journal of Translation.