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It was not until 384 AD that Jerome, upon the request of Pope
Damasus, launched into Christendom a Latin translation of the New
Testament based on the sense rather than the word. In defence GC the
'sense for sense' approach, Jerome quotes Cicero as saying, "What men
like you...call fidelity in translation, the learned term pestilent
minuteness.., it is hard to preserve in a translation the
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charm of
expressions which in another language are most felicitous.. .If I render
word for word, the result will sound
tt-41. ve,tel
uncouth, and if compelled by
necessity I alter anything in the order of wording, I shall seem to
have departed from the function of translator." (Nida, 1965, p13) The
dilemma with which translators are confronted cannot be otherwise
pinpointed. Should the translator opt for literalness, his
translation would seem awkward and clumsy; should he breathlessly
hanker after the 'sense', he would, in all probability, depart from
and/or lose sight of the original text. This dilemma gave rise to
various concepts, chief among them is the concept of Equivalence on
which an enormous corpus of literature has been written. However, the
form-content dichotomy has not yet been adequately finalized.
Translation gained another impetus with the establishment of the
Baghdad school of translators. Translation movement flourished in the
eighth and ninth centuries with the influx of a group of Syrian
translators who flocked to Baghdad, then a world centre for learning
and trade. Ancient Greek classics were translated into Arabic.
History tells us that Al-Ma'moun, the Abbasid Caliph, paid the
translator his translation's weight in gold. He even went as far as to
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