The scriptures were written mainly in two languages. The Old Testament’s language was Hebrew. The New Testament’s language was the common Greek spoken in the time of Christ and his apostles. Today the scriptures are translated from Hebrew and Greek into hundreds of other languages. Most people need the scriptures translated into the language which they speak.

Dynamic Equivalence in Translation

This lesson is about one of the principles of translation known as "dynamic equivalence". Don’t let this technical term put you off. The principle itself is both easy and important to understand. By taking a little time to understand this principle, you will be more intelligent both in choosing the best translations to buy, and in reading those translations.

1 What is dynamic equivalence?

When a statement in one language is translated into another language, there are two things that the translator must consider.

• The form of words
• The force of meaning

Translation is not accomplished by merely substituting words in a word-for-word equivalence. More often than not, this will not produce the force (or dynamic) of meaning. The translator will therefore modify the form of words so as to achieve the same force of meaning. The jargon for "the same force of meaning" is "dynamic equivalence".

2 An example

The best way to explain dynamic equivalence, and why it is important, is to take an example from the scriptures. There are dozens of examples. To keep our study as simple as possible however, I have tried to choose just one example that would illustrate the principle of dynamic equivalence well. It is a phrase in Acts 20:7.

In the original manuscript, the phrase would have appeared something like this. Writers used only capital letters and did not put spaces between words...

Translators today have the Greek in an easier form to read. The spaces have been inserted, and a lower case script is used. The phrase we are using as an example looks like this. The translator’s task is to help us understand what these Greek words mean, and he (or she) will do so by using an English phrase that conveys the same meaning as that Greek phrase does.

The translator would not (as we mentioned above) simply write an equivalent English word in place of each Greek word as is done below. A word-for-word replacement is of little use, because it is only a form of words equivalent, and does not convey the force of meaning (the dynamic equivalence). Whilst each English word is a counterpart of a Greek word, this string of English words is not a translation, because it fails to convey the meaning that the string of Greek words conveys.

The translator, because he understands the Greek, would see three changes that need to be made in the above English rendering, so that it will give the sense of the Greek...

• the word "σαββατων" rendered "sabbaths'" really means "week" in this instance
• the word "μια" rendered "one" has the ordinal sense and actually means "first" in this instance
• there is an elipsis in the Greek phrase and a word implied in the Greek needs to be supplied in the English, namely the word "day"

So the translator writes the phrase this way...

The Greek phrase is now rendered in plain English such that we understand it well. The phrase has been made intelligible to us. Most translators would be satisfied with this translation. It nicely conveys both the form of words and the force of meaning.

Study continued