Rev. Eugene Nida, noted linguist, dies

The Rev. Eugene Nida, a linguist, Baptist minister and biblical scholar who made the world's most popular book even more widely available by helping translate the scripture into 200 languages, died Aug. 25 at a hospital in Brussels. He was 96.

He had Alzheimer's disease, said Geof Morin, a spokesman for the New York-based American Bible Society, where Nida worked for more than 50 years.

Nida's major contribution to Bible translation was the concept of "functional equivalence." Instead of using literal translations, his idea was to incorporate native culture and idiom into the Bible's story.

Nida's system allowed translators to rearrange sentences to convey its meaning and intention in the native language.

Morin said Nida's "fundamental equivalence" created "a complete paradigm shift for Bible translation that affected nearly every contemporary translation ever since."

A project he started in 1978 to translate the bible into Inuktitut, the tongue of the Inuit people who live in the Arctic, took 24 years to complete.

The task required so much time because the Bible -- whose story unfolds among palm trees and sandy deserts and includes camels and donkeys -- had to make sense to the Inuit, who live around vast expanses of snow and ice and are more familiar with seals and walruses. "You can't translate without cultural context," Nida explained.

Nida also helped write the Good News Bible, which has 218 million copies in print, Morin said. Using Nida's system, the Good News Bible and its numerous variations deconstructed large words into smaller, clearer ideas.