When translating a text there are a number of decisions to make. One of these is how close to make your translation to the original text.
Some translators make it very close indeed. They translate word by word and keep the sentence structure as close to the original as they can (this is called formal equivalence or word for word). Other translators try to capture the meaning of the original text and don’t worry so much about keeping the sentence in the same structure as it was originally (this is called dynamic equivalence or thought for thought). An extreme version of dynamic equivalence is a paraphrase which begins not with the original language but with another English translation and then attempts to make it more understandable.
There are very few purely formal or purely dynamic equivalence translations, most are a mix of the two but with an emphasis in one direction or another.
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