Dynamic and Formal Equivalence - Function Vs. Form

Function Vs. Form

As Nida himself wrote in the glossary of The Theory and Practice of Translation, dynamic equivalence is the "quality of a translation in which the message of the original text has been so transported into the receptor language that the response of the receptor is essentially like that of the original receptors." Nida tended to use the term so that "the response of the receptor" was mostly semantic – the target reader took the meaning of the text to be such that the source reader would have taken the source text to mean the same thing – which led to critical accusations that this was just sense-for-sense translation in new guise. But if "response" is taken in its full extension, dynamic equivalence could include not only what Aristotle (in the Rhetoric) calls logos (meaning and structure) but ethos (the reader's assumption about the text's authority) and pathos (how the reader feels about the text).

In later years he distanced himself from the former term and preferred the term "functional equivalence". The term "functional equivalence" suggests not just that the equivalence is between the function of the source text in the source culture and the function of the target text (translation) in the target culture, but that "function" can be thought of as a property of the text. It is, however, possible to think of functional equivalence too in the larger (dynamic/intercultural) context as about more than the structure of texts – as about how people interact in cultures.

The terms "dynamic equivalence" and "formal equivalence" were originally coined to describe ways of translating the Bible, but the two approaches are applicable to any translation.