He became a Christian at a young age, when he responded to the altar call at his church "to accept Christ as my Saviour.

He ministered for a short time among the Tarahumara Indians in Chihuahua, Mexico, until health problems due to an inadequate diet and the high altitude forced him to leave.

Sometime in this period, Nida became a founding charter member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a related organization to the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

In 1937, Nida undertook studies at the University of Southern California, where he obtained a master's degree in New Testament Greek in 1939.

[2] Despite his conservative background, in later years Nida became increasingly ecumenical and New Evangelical[clarification needed] in his approach.

Nida retired in the early 1980s, although he continued to give lectures in universities all around the world, and lived in Alpine, Arizona, USA; Madrid, Spain and Brussels, Belgium.

His doctoral dissertation, A Synopsis of English Syntax, was the first full-scale analysis of a major language according to the "immediate-constituent" theory.

Nida also developed the componential analysis technique, which split words into their components to help determine equivalence in translation (e.g. "bachelor" = male + unmarried).

The principles governing an F-E translation would then be: reproduction of grammatical units; consistency in word usage; and meanings in terms of the source context.