Why Plenary Inspiration Does NOT Favour "Essentially Literal" Bible Translation

I essentially agree with what you have said in your post. Dynamic equivalence (DE) *can* be compatible with and be just as favorable to verbal plenary inspiration, especially if we remember how Nida actually defined dynamic equivalence, as resting on kernel structures, skewing of grammatical categories, and analysis-transfer-restructuring, and to some extent reader response. However, I think what you have said doesn’t quite cover the issue. As a rejoinder to Grudem it is adequate, but as an assessment of dynamic equivalence as it has been understood post-Nida, there are some bare spots in the discussion. First, there is a great problem with the term “dynamic equivalence.” The problem is its breadth. The NIV, NLT, TEV, CEV, and The Message are all called dynamic equivalent. That fact alone almost negates the meaning of dynamic equivalence. The term has been used in so many diverse and imprecise ways that to say that dynamic equivalence favors verbal plenary inspiration just as much as essentially literal translation is doubtful at best as an objective statement. That is why I said DE *can* be compatible with verbal plenary inspiration. The fact is that many people who do not believe in verbal plenary inspiration justify their deviation from accounting for all the words of the text under the broad and vague umbrella of DE. I think the term has outlived its usefulness. Second, there are specific practices that translators have done that are in themselves not highly compatible with verbal plenary inspiration, and from what I have seen these practices are more likely to be found in a DE translation than in an essentially literal translation. These include conjectural emendation, radical restructuring, elimination of parallelism in poetry, and what I have called creative rewriting. The first one, conjectural emendation, has been practiced in many types of translations, but it is a practice that by its very nature questions the verbal dimensions of the text. As I said at the beginning of this post, I essentially (“essentially literally”? :) ) agree with your post, but I don’t want to pat us all on the back too much. DE and meaning-based translation have made important and useful changes in our understanding of translation, but these terms are poorly understood and poorly defined, even among the members of the Bible translation community, and the terms are "old news." We need to be more precise in our applications of these tools.

Just scanning through what I said in my original post, I agree that saying DE "can" be compatible with plenary inspiration is a better way to put it.