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Eugene Nida
To cite this article: Eugene Nida (1945) Linguistics and Ethnology in Translation-Problems,
<i>WORD</i>, 1:2, 194-208, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1945.11659254
the fig tree and all the other trees of the forest put out their leaves.
One must equate the summer with the rainy season, but in this
case the rainy season must always precede the putting forth of the
leaves. It is impossible to employ the Spanish word verano, which
is used by the Spanish-speaking people to designate the calendrical
summer in temperate zones, for the word verano has been borrowed
by the Mayas to designate the hot season during March, April, and
May. Ecological differences between the tropics and the semi-
tropical or temperate zones necessitate many adaptations, but often,
even at best, the equivalents are not too close. The only other pos-
sibility in the illustration just cited would be to designate a month
instead of the 8Ummer as the time foretold by the leafing of the
fig tree; but even this would be unsatisfactory, due to the consider-
able fluctuation in the beginning of the rainy season.
If is often difficult in tropical countries to rende.r the word
"desert" as a place which has sparse vegetation. It is absolutely
inconceivable to a Maya Indian that any place should not have
vegetation wtle8s it has been cleared for a maize-field, and a
cleared field is not the cultural equivalent of the desert of Pale-
stine. Accordingly, one must translate "desert" as an "abandoned
place," for culturally the two places are similar in that they both
lack human population. In this case, the culturally significant
features must be substituted for the ecological ones.
When some region is completely lacking in some topographical
feature, it is frequently impossible to present exactly the feature
of another region. For example, the inhabitants of some of the
low limestone islands of the Pacific and the Indians of the penin-
sula of Yacatan find it almost impossible to conceive of "mountains"
in the sense of the Palestinian equivalent. To the Maya Indian a
muul "hill" is "an elevation of land," and at best it cannot he mur.h
more than one hundred feet high. If one uses "great hill" to
designate "mountain," it may mean an elevation of as much as
one hundred and fifty feet, but in no case does it approximate
something which may rise several thousand feet into the air. Such
a thing is quite inconceivable to a Maya, and any attempt to force
him to imagine anything so large only makes him think that the
source of such information is untrustworthy. A "great hill''
is not a completely accurate designation; of a "mountain" iu
Palestine, but it is the best cultural and ecological equivalent. To
translate "river" by "flowing water," or "lake" by "larre expanse
198 EUGENE NIDA
in the particular culture the evil spirits are very much in the
majority. If the spirit is a good spirit, it is usually necessary
specifically to denote the fact by an attributive. The combination
which the translator chose for "Holy Spirit" was doubly confusing.
To the natives, the only meanings for this combination of words
would be "a spirit (probably an evil one) which has acquired a
tabu by contact with some other spirit (undoubtedly evil)" or "a
spirit which makes objects tabu." This second type of spirit could
only very rarely be a good spirit. The fact that the translator had
such extreme difficulty in explaining to natives that a good God
possessed such a spirit should have been evidence enough that the
phrase did not make sense. It has generally been found that the
concept of tabu involves so many other related aspects that the
translator is usually forced to start with some such word as "pure"
or "clean," and by a process of teaching to build up the concept
of "holy."
At times a literal translation of the Greek text may have rather
disastrous consequences in an aboriginal language. In the eastern
dialect of Aztec the literal translation of Jesus' words, "Abraham
rejoiced to see my day" (John 8.56), would be a declaration on
the part of Jesus that he was a shaman with a basically animal
nature. The Eastern Aztecs believe that a shaman or physically
deformed person who appears to have some mystic power is actually
an animal and walks about as such during the night. During the
day, however, he assumes the guise of a man. The daytime-guise
is called "his day." Jesus' statement would be interpreted by the
Aztecs as being an explicit statement as to his being an animal
and not a person.
In Acts 16.16, a girl "possessed with a spirit of divination" is
mentioned. In the Mazatec language of Mexico this is quite diffi-
cult to translate literally. There is no regular expression for
divination, and no spirit is directly associated with this belief.
The Mazatecs, however, do believe in certain types of divination,
but the expression which denotes an individual who possesses such
powers is "one who has two spirits." The one spirit is that which
everyon~ possesses, but the second is a special supernatural spirit.
To translate "a girl with a spirit of divination" one must actually
say in Mazatec "a girl who has two spirits."
The phase of culture in which the greatest number of translation
problems arise is the linguistic one. Language is a part of culture,
LINGUISTICS TRANSLATION-PROBLEMS 203
cultural items and the words which are used to designate them.
A combination of analytical social anthropology and descriptive
linguistics provides the key to the study of semantics.