Functional equivalent translation of New Testament hortatory discourse into Hill Madia

In the early eighties the United Bible Societies estimated that about three of every four translations it published were stylistically inadequate. Thirty years later, not much has changed. Translators of the scriptures are taught the value of producing a translation that uses the natural style of the receptor language but are often unable to do so because they are not given the right tools. Eugene Nida pioneered the concept of functional equivalence translation, but was unable to outline a systematic method to achieve it.;The purpose of this dissertation is to address this problem by making use of theories from functional linguistics to perform a comparative discourse analysis of the source and receptor languages at both the propositional and discourse levels.;The focus of this study is the synthesis of a hortatory discourse analysis framework that is capable of generating guidelines for a functionally equivalent rendering of explicitly hortatory New Testament texts into Hill Madia, a Dravidian language of central India. I have proposed a three-tiered comparative discourse analysis model that uses top-down processing, with rhetorical structure analysis at the top level, modality analysis in the middle and information structure analysis at the bottom level. I applied this model to the Greek text of Galatians and then to a corpus of five native-authored hortatory texts in Madia. The structure-function correlations that emerged from this comparative study were then synthesized into a functionally equivalent text in Madia. The ideal to be attained in this exercise was to have Paul's communicative intents and purposes in writing Galatians expressed in Madia by means of native Madia devices and rhetorical features. Approximately ninety one percent of the communicative functions identified in Galatians were successfully expressed in Madia.;Besides providing a systematic method for achieving functional equivalence translation, my model also has implications for creating an awareness of discourse features in source and receptor languages for both translators and translation consultants.