Grab Instantly Fascinated By Languages Assembled By Eugene Albert Nida Released Through Hardcover

A. Nida had a productive career as a consultant for missionary teams translating the Bible into the languages of the world, However, he also had a PhD in linguistics and considered himself mainly a linguist, Plus, the insights he gained about how to render Hebrew or Greek into vastly different languages of vastly different cultures and ecologies had some repercussions for general linguistic theory and translation studies.
This gained him enormous respect among the general scholarly community just look at the names in the table of contents of his Festschrift.
Born in, Nida lived to the good old age of, and his memoirs Fascinated By Languages were published by John Benjamins in, a little under a decade before his death.


One notices right away the lack of any editing, Nidas thoughts are gathered haphazardly, there often isn't any connection between one paragraph and the next, It can be frustrating to read through a series of nonsequiturs, and the book does unfortunately feel like the rambling account of an elderly man.
Also, sometimes Nida gets some

facts wrong because he seems to be recalling languages that he hadn't used for decades such as a mistake about how the Japanese writing system works, and there are a great deal of typos here.
If only the publisher can have intervened and polished the manuscript a bit,

That said, there is a great deal of enjoyable trivia here, The book is essentially divided into two main parts: on one hand, we have Nidas scattered anecdotes of his travels to lecture and help Bible translation teams in somecountries around the world, while on the other hand he discusses various aspects of the Old and New Testaments that have proven challenging for translators over his career.
Even though Nida is drawing his examples of translation difficulties from the Bible, they will mainly interest linguists of any or no faith.


In fact, even when speaking about how to translate Christian doctrine, Nida stays very detached from the religion, He gives off no sense of personal religious zeal, which must have helped a lot in allowing him to interact with academia without offending.
It is in fact difficult to get any concrete idea from this book of what religious dogma Nida exactly held, though his relationship with Roman Catholic translators seems to have been a little rocky.
Online references tell me he was a Baptist,

Nida ends the book with speaking a little bit of his personal life since retirement, including how he met his second wife, the Spanish translator María Elena FernandezMiranda, and moved around Europe in his old age more than he expected to.
His wife ultimately wrote Mi vida con Eugene Nida, her own book looking back at their relationship, In this unique account ofyears of Bible translation, Eugene Nida sets out his journey with a personal touch, On the way, he reveals the importance of a solid knowledge of Greek and Hebrew as well as of the historical settings in which the Bible was created, in order to render effective translations.
Through his story we get to know Nida's views on translations through the ages, in different cultures and narrative traditions, right through to thest Century.

This book is in the first place a study in anthropological linguistics that tells the rich history of Bible translation, the Bible Societies, translator training, and cultural translation problems.

Eugene A. Nidawent to UCLA Phi Beta Kappa,and the University of Southern California Helenistic Greek,, He taught at the Summer Institute of Linguistics fromand is past president of the Linguistic Society of America,
Fromhe was language consultant for the American Bible Society and the United Bible Societies which led him to study many cultures acrosscountries and to lecture in over a hundred universities and colleges to this day.

His published works include Bible Translating, Customs and Cultures, Toward a Science of Translating, Religion across Cultures, The Sociolinguistics of Intercultural Communicationand Translation in Context.
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