Widely considered the father of modern Bible translation, Mr. Nida (pronounced NYE-duh) was for four decades the head of the Bible society’s translation program .... Previously, most Bible translations had been done by Western missionaries, who rarely had great familiarity with the local language. Not surprisingly, the word-for-word translations that resulted were often stiff, unpalatable and largely inaccessible .... Drawing on linguistics, anthropology and communication science, Mr. Nida devised an approach to translation known as “dynamic equivalence.” (It was later called “functional equivalence.”)  .... Traversing the globe by plane, train and canoe, Mr. Nida set in motion the painstaking process of translating Scripture into more than 200 languages, among them Navajo; Tagalog and Ilocano, spoken in the Philippines; Quechua, an indigenous language of Peru; Hmong, spoken in Southeast Asia; and Inuktitut, an indigenous language of the Canadian Arctic.  Mr. Nida also played an active role in creating the Good News Bible, a colloquial English-language edition ....