SBL Nida Lectures
Since 2007 the Nida Institute has recruited and sponsored highly recognized scholars to present informative and engaging lectures at the annual and international meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. These are highly publicized within SBL and attract a diverse audience.
This venue promotes the Institute's trans-disciplinary approach to translation while providing biblical scholars an opportunity to challenge and augment their traditional understanding of the theory and practice of translation. A list of past lecturers demonstrates the Institute's commitment to exposing SBL's membership to top-ranking innovative thinkers working in fields relevant to translation studies.
2013
Annual Meeting – Timothy Beal, Tracing the Other in Translation: Levinas, Alterity, and the Task of the Biblical Translator
It seems that Levinas presents a very practical problem that is fundamental to translation, whether or not we are always conscious of it: if, following Levinas, we understand alterity as fundamentally untranslatable (that which cannot be made fully present in representation, that which is "otherwise than being," "non-totalizable," "in-finite," … "a transcendence inconvertible to immanence") and if, again following Levinas, one's primary ethical responsibility is to and for that very untranslatable Other, what is the translator to do?
International Meeting – Simon Crisp, Texts, Pretexts, Contexts and Paratexts: How Translation Studies Might Shed Light on Biblical Text Criticism
Session 8-41a: Monday, July 8, 3-4:15; Location: Theatre B - Maths
The starting point for this lecture is the fact that the concept and status of the “source text” are central to the discussions taking place in both Translation Studies (TS) and Textual Criticism (TC). In TS a shift has taken place in recent decades from a view of translation as prescriptive and source oriented to one where it is understood as descriptive and target oriented. In Gideon Toury’s memorable formulation, translators do not operate in the interest of the source text, and translations are facts of the target system only. At the same time, in TC the notion of a single original text has been challenged both for the Hebrew Bible and for the Greek New Testament, with considerable consequences for the way in which the goals of the discipline are formulated (and of course for Bible translation where these challenges have immediate practical implications).
2012
Annual Meeting – Mark L. Strauss, The Relative Merits of Foreignness and Domestication in Contemporary Bible Translation
International Meeting, Lourens de Vries The Romantic Turn in Bible Translation Annual Meeting, Bible Translation Section Translating Alterity
2011
International Meeting - Valerie Henitiuk, The Bones of the Stuff: Translation and World Literature
Annual Meeting - Edwin Gentzler, The Power Turn in Translation Studies
2010
International Meeting - Siri Nergaard, Semiotics and Translation
Annual Meeting - Vicente Rafael, The Babel of Monolingualism: Translation, American English and Empire
2009
International Meeting - Christiane Nord, Intertextuality in Early Christian Literature and Translation
Annual Meeting - Maria Tymoczko, Translating the Bible in Circumstances of Asymmetrical Power: The Openness of Texts and the Self-Determination of the Reader
2008
Annual Meeting - Larry Venuti, Genealogies of Translation Theory
2007
Annual Meeting - Anthony Pym, Bible Translation and Philosophy of Dialogue: Making the Text Speak to the Future
