Book Review: What's In A Version?
Henry Neufeld
ISBN:1893729206
Until a few weeks ago I had never heard of Energion Publications, nor Henry Neufeld. They were nice enough to provide me with a review copy of What’s In A Version, and thus an acquaintance has been established.
What’s In A Version is a good synopsis of the translation process.
Neufeld carefully explains key terms in the translation process. Terms such as higher criticism, textual criticism, edition, manuscript, etc are defined for the reader.
The author explains about textual families and why some texts are favored above others. He also describes the weighing of texts to determine what the best translation would be.
I truly appreciated the fact that Neufeld took the time to describe and define the terms formal equivalence (literal) and functional equivalence (dynamic) for the reader. It was most helpful for him to further explain that a translation that is translated with functional equivalence in mind is not necessarily a paraphrase. That should help many of the people who read this book.
In addittion to the definitions within the text, Neufeld provides a glossary of terms.
Another thing that was nice to see was Neufeld’s scaled comparison of various translations that showed the reader the readability as well as the degree to which a translation was a functional equivalence translation or a formal equivalence translation.
I highly recommend this book to those who wish to learn more about what happened when their Bible was translated.
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