Nida is trained as a linguist and anthropologist, and was asked by the Bible societies to find out why so many translations of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament are not only difficult to understand, but also frequently misunderstood. The short answer he found is that expert translators must be not only multilingual, but also multicultural. The fuller answer fills the volume, which has been used by people in a wide range of cultures and language groups. The tradition of western translation, linguistic meaning, referential and emotive meaning, principles of correspondence, and machine translation are among his topics. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)