Bible translation should not be done with a hand tied to the back

Imagine a situation (difficult to do in a world as peaceful as ours) where a country is faced with a hostile invasion. Now the nation's politicians come together to devise the policies for defending against this threat. Here is what they come up with:

• Give everything! Let's kick out the evil invaders!
• In light of our pacific reputation, all effort must be made to use non-lethal force. Even a seriously injured invader must be seen as a blemish to our record.
• A threat to our nation's security must not be misused as an excuse to go back on our efforts towards our zero-emission goals. Therefore, no fighting gear using internal-combustion engines will be allowed inside a zone of twenty kilometers from the front lines.
• We must not permit our valuable infrastructure such as roads and bridges to suffer disproportionately from our own defence efforts. Fighting machines weighing more than ten metric tons are therefore not permitted in this confrontation. A delegation has been sent to negotiations in a third country to demand the same behavior from our enemy forces. We are very hopeful they will comply.
  
• Unfortunately, hostilities began after the budget for the fiscal year was already approved. Our valiant forces are therefore requested to use up what is currently available, and make the necessary requests in time for the next fiscal year, using the appropriate channels.
• We are confident that our youth have the hearts of lions and already have all it takes to deal with the threat expertly. Wasting time on training will keep them from the front lines unduly long, and therefore we declare them ready to fight once they have been issued with their non-lethal fighting equipment that we know will serve them well when facing the enemy.
• Keeping the nation fed is a major contribution to the defence of the country, and therefore half the defence force will be deployed for harvesting the next crop from August to October.
  

Miracles have been heard of in war, but a nation that approaches military conflict in this way would almost certainly be doomed. What is the problem here? This government quite obviously does not take the situation seriously, and operates under absurdly over-optimistic assumptions. Everyone would normally agree that a hostile invasion is an existential threat to the nation, and every other priority, goal or value will have to be subordinated under the one overarching goal of fending off the invaders, to restore the sovereignty of all territory and the peace of all inhabitants. Unless that is accomplished, no other consideration can stand in the way of doing everything that needs to be done to make that happen in the most effective way.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very much in favor of reaching zero-emission goals, of maintaining a functioning infrastructure, of maximum restraint regarding the use of force, and of good financial stewardship of public finances. All these things are in themselves excellent goals to strive for, and each government should have them high on their list of priorities. But an invasion creates a state of emergency, where only one goal is in focus, and the armed forces would indeed fight with one hand tied to their back if they were saddled with all these other considerations. Needless to say here, there are some very important limitations we do impose on our armed forces, such as the Geneva Conventions, which all armies of the world should adhere to.

So why do I bring up this question of armed conflict with wrong priorities in a blog on Bible translation?

There are a few things that probably most of the actors and supporters of Bible translation can agree on: It is the crucial tool that will allow faster and more sustainable progress towards the evangelization and discipleship of the world. Without Bible translation, knowledge about the Christian faith remains shallow among the believers, and over a few generations is steadily replaced by grossly distorted traditions, superstitions and ritual practices that bear little semblance to what being a Christian is really about according to the texts of the Bible. This has all been seen over and over again in Church history in situations where Bible translation had been ignored or done badly. So, given its place in the strategy of mission, we do agree that Bible translation needs to happen and that it needs to happen well. It cannot be taken lightly, and it requires a very narrow focus for the people who are engaged in it. Their effort will suffer when they are asked to solve all other problems of the world alongside their Bible translation task, or when they are deployed to their work with insufficient training, knowledge or tools.

This is more of an organizational problem nowadays than one of individual actors in specific projects. Sure enough, even in the past traditionally run projects got bogged down in expectations to take care of all kinds of other jobs while doing a translation, such as creating a Sunday school curriculum, setting up a food bank, providing health services, and lots of other good ideas. But in the last couple of decades the same appears to have happened to Bible translation organizations, who find increasing demands to solve all the problems of the world. At the same time they are being given less of the things they need to complete the core task. I could name ideas such as the following:

• Oecumenical goals: All the denominations in a country need to work together before translation can begin.
• Localization: Expertise, staff and decision making need to be entirely local.
• Holistic ministry: Bible translation is just one of the many things that need to be done to contribute towards striving and flourishing communities, and this is now asked of the Bible translation organizations.
  
• Planning horizon: Each translation project needs to reach its goals in a prescribed very short time frame, which takes priority over all other considerations.
• Training: Instead of providing the best possible training content that equips the workforce to become better at Bible translation, other considerations water down the content, such as a perceived need for academic accreditation, or an overemphasis on ancillary subjects.
  
• Funding: The flow of finances drives the mid- and long-term goals of a project, viewing any additional steps, such as more research or better training, as unwelcome delays to the process. Money also determines what the organizations do, as some activities are more marketable among major donors than others, even if they don't lead to better Bible translations.
  

More such factors could be named (and will be pursued in detail in some other blog entries) that saddle Bible translation projects, and, on a higher level, Bible translation organizations, with the need to satisfy additional expectations that have no direct bearing on the quality of the translation, except often in negative ways. The obligation to pursue all these additional goals not only distracts the implementing organizations, it in fact creates an environment where the necessary structures and processes are abandoned in the name of these extra goals, without even questioning whether everything is in really place that is needed for successful Bible translation.

As an example the idea of localization may serve. In and of itself, localization is a very good idea. It means that over time more and more is done to draw local actors into the Bible translation movement, so that Bible translation may become more sustainable in all areas of the world even without the presence of Western missionaries who may or may not be coming forward in the future. Therefore, all organizations do well to strengthen local structures, to train local experts, to forge strong local partnerships, to raise more awareness of the need for Bible translation, to get more local players on board, and to reduce the dependence on funding from outside the country.

What will not do, though is to act as if all these things were already in place, and therefore cut off the local and national Bible translation structures from all kinds of foreign influence, however necessary it may still be. In a sense, it appears as if the Western sending organizations have turned the fear that expat missionaries will no longer be recruited into a self-fulfilling prophecy, by just no longer recruiting such missionaries into Bible translation! By decree of the boards of these organizations it is now taken for granted that there is a sufficiently large and well-trained workforce wherever Bible translation needs to happen, and therefore nobody is attracted into serving in such specialist roles anymore. This is an example of needlessly tying the hands of the BT movement in large parts of the world, often against the advice of the few experts that still work in these countries, and against the expressed wishes of the local partners who know that their teams would do much better if there were a larger and stronger expat technical support force.

Instead of evaluating carefully where a country or region is placed on the road to self-sufficiency in Bible translation, some overly optimistic assumptions result in severing local Bible translation practioners from much of the necessary infrastructure that would help them do better translation: language surveyors, linguists, Bible translation consultants, literacy and orthography specialists, trained anthropologists. Young people in the West who could potentially be recruited into such roles instead are given the message that these kinds of specialist services are no longer needed in mission, as everything is now done by locals. This is Bible translation strategy based on wishful thinking, and it will not get the job done.

In many places in the world the resulting bottlenecks regarding these services have an ever increasing impact on the quality of translations. Instead of addressing these bottlenecks, the organizations are trying to cope without these services, devising new "innovative" procedures that shortcut or bypass them, in the hope that somehow an acceptable quality may still come out, after all. I don't think that this is the appropriate response to tackle a task as important as Bible translation, and it gives me similar premonitions as the defence policies of said government above. We are setting the current Bible translation movement up for failure. While writing this, I am thinking very hard about ways to say this in any less dramatic terms, but I just don't know how to paint a nicer picture here. The ship is sinking.

It will be necessary for all Bible translation organizations to come to the realization that Bible translation needs to be taken seriously as a task. If, even for the best of reasons, we hobble the translation workforce by driving well-trained people away because they come from the wrong countries, as if full local sustainability had already been achieved, we are undermining the very thing we have set out to do. And the same holds true for many of the other assumptions and practices that currently work against better results in Bible translation. There needs to be a willingness to honestly look at whatever works and doesn't work, and draw the right conclusions from it. Right now I don't see much of that happening.

Bible translation is a complex task

 

It may be tempting to assume that Bible translation is a pretty straightforward undertaking. Sure, it takes some preparation and training, but once you get a hang of the principles of translation and have some tools and resources at your fingertips, you just sit down behind your sturdy desk and get going. Steadily you work yourself through the Bible, first one verse at a time, then one chapter at a time, then one book at a time. You reach the point where nothing is left to translate, and presto! the job is done.

It should also be easily plannable. Once you gain momentum, you get into a rhythm of so-and-so many verses per day, and when you have reached that point, it may even be possible to predict how long it will take you to finish the 7,957 verses of the whole New Testament or even the 23,145 verses of the complete Bible.

Alas, it isn't that easy.

The reason for this is that translating the Bible is a task of the utmost complexity. As a project, it requires the interaction of a frightening number of skills, competencies and knowledge pools, which are usually not expected to be all found in one individual person. So, since it takes more people to cooperate, it is necessary to devise a process where the outcomes of some steps are the required inputs for other steps, which in turn may then even feed back into works of the first steps. Some phases of the project may take forever to complete, while others can be dealt with in a less overwhelming time frame.

In the following I'd like to dip your nose into some of the many complex components of a Bible translation project, so that you get an understanding why it takes more than just a computer and some stamina to get the job done.

Sociolinguistics and language survey

It is by no means a trivial job to decide where a Bible translation should happen, or for which community. A lot of damage has been done over the last few centuries by Bible translators just stomping into a place and starting a translation project without figuring out the lay of the land. In any given area, how many languages are spoken there? Do the people of one village speak in the same way as the people in the next village? If not, is the nature of the difference rather one between dialects of the same language, or between two different languages? Is someone already at work on a translation into the same language, but possibly on the other side of the nearby border? If there are several dialects to a language, which of the dialects should serve as the standard for the Bible translation and all other products of language development?

Most people growing up in Europe or North America have no idea how little we sometimes know about the language situation in a given area in Africa or Asia. Even if you ask the people in a certain place casually, they may themselves only have a rough idea of what their situation is, and only by interviewing the people in many places can you slowly piece together a more complete picture. The ethnic group that claims to speak the same language may actually not be able to communicate successfully across the whole area. Other groups which insist on speaking very different languages may actually have no problems whatsoever talking to each other. All of this is also a moving target, as attitudes shift and languages change over time. The only way to address this is to have a language survey team assess the situation and come up with a recommendation as to where to start a Bible translation. Cutting out this step of the process may bite you back several times before the translation is finished, and even for generations beyond.

Biblical languages, exegesis

Of course most people know that the Bible was written thousands of years ago in languages which are no longer spoken in the same way nowadays. Although there are still people speaking Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages have moved on dramatically since Biblical times. Fortunately, a lot of helps on these languages are available for translators. Countless commentaries have been written on each book of the Bible, some of them specializing on how to translate these books. Expressions that may have more than one possible interpretation are carefully explained, with the reasons favoring one or the other way. All occurring word forms are now meticulously analysed in interlinear software tools. You won't even have to consult a dictionary these days. So one does not have to be an expert on Biblical languages anymore, as all the necessary information is now available in easily accessible ways. Well, if you know English, which isn't always the case with translators everywhere. Therefore, some people specialize on translating the existing tools into so-called easy-English versions, which lower the language barrier significantly.

Target language matters

Although much help can be found on the Biblical languages, very little is usually available on the target languages of the translation. Of all the 7000 languages in the world, not more than 1500 languages can be said to have been adequately described with a comprehensive grammar and a dictionary. But these tools are indispensable in order to make sure that the best words are found in translation, and that the best possible structure is chosen.

There is the widespread assumption that the increased use of mother-tongue translators in our days makes this less of a problem. But this assumption unfortunately doesn't hold. It is true that a modestly trained mother-tongue translator will not produce any ungrammatical sentences in translation – but a good text is not just a collection of grammatical sentences. The language may provide choices of which the translators are not consciously aware, and therefore a grammatically correct sentence may nonetheless contain really bad choices when compared to the original. The translators can only be made aware of these choices when the language has been studied in detail by a trained linguist that knows what to look for. The same is true about the lexicon: of all the tens of thousands of words that are available in every language, most speakers only actively control a small fraction – this is even true about any of us, no matter how good our schooling and further education may have been! So a good dictionary will be a big help to give the Bible translation the same lexical depth that we find in the original texts of the New or Old Testament.

Worldview differences and anthropology

We all know that the people in Biblical times lived very different lives than we do nowadays. Their environment looked very different, their technological options were restricted, but their knowledge on various natural phenomena vastly superior to the average Westerner's. Other individuals were important and/or well known, different stories were told, different songs sung, and different riddles asked of each other. There were rather divergent ideas as to what behavior is appropriate, what values important, what ideas repugnant, and what actions constitute a crime. The same is true between the Biblical cultures and the cultures of the languages that the translation needs to be made for. Things that the Biblical authors could leave implicit may have to be made explicit in the translation. To determine this, a good understanding of the target language culture is needed, which ideally requires a thorough anthropological investigation.

Orthography and literacy

For the vast majority of the languages for which translation still needs to happen no established way to write the language exists. Languages differ wildly about the number of their sounds, and how they relate to each other. Does the language have five different vowels or nine? How many places of articulation are differentiated between the consonants? What is the role of tones in the language, or of vowel length, or of nasalisation? To find out, a linguist needs to study the sound system, and work with speakers of the language to test the hypotheses. Only then is it possible to propose an alphabet and orthographic rules for the language. Before this is in place, translators can't know how to write down the translated scripture.

Related to that is the need to organize initial reading classes, so that there are readers when the translation is completed. Ideally, enough time has passed before the publication of the New Testament that it is clear whether the proposed orthography is readable and accepted by the language community.

Technological advances have made it possible nowadays to publish the Bible entirely in audio formats, supposedly circumventing the need to create an orthography for a language community that is not inclined to have written language development. This cannot be taken for granted, though, even for very small language communities, and creating an oral Bible translation adds its own level of complexities with very different translation processes, and with a high dependency on well-trained technicians wielding expensive equipment. These things are still in the experimental stage nowadays.

The translation process

Translating a book of the Bible is an intricate multi-step process, involving increasingly larger numbers of people. The first step is a draft translation created by a single mother-tongue translator, considering many of the complexities already mentioned above. Once done, this draft is passed on to the whole translation team, who discusses it in great detail, and exchanging many arguments which center on the big questions: Is the translation accurate? Is the translation clear (if it is not, it can't be accurate)? Is the translation natural (if it is not, it can't really be clear)? Over time, the team will come up with a second draft. Now it needs to create a back-translation into a major language that helps a consultant who is not a speaker of the language to understand what the translators have done. After studying this back translation, the consultant will meet with the team and try to pry holes into their draft, making sure that, to the best of his or her knowledge, the text is indeed natural, clear and accurate. The consultant can only really know this if there is sufficient information about the language structures, its lexicon, and the culture.

The consulant-approved draft is then printed in small numbers and given to a number of reviewers from the communities, who read through the texts and give all kinds of feedback, such as wordings they don't like, passages they don't understand, spelling errors, etc. This feedback is then incorporated into the final version which may be published as a trial Scripture portion. Before the New Testament is completed, all books are subjected to another review. Then there is a final read-through, before the complicated interaction with the typesetter begins, involving also a number of consistency checks and last-minute decisions on names or orthographic solutions.

Key terms

Key terms are words with a specific theological meaning that pop up all over the Bible, such as repentance, grace, sacrifice, atonement, etc., including names for God. In our major languages these words have centuries of history, but in a language that is expressing Christian thought for the first time, many of these words still need to be developed. Great care needs to be taken about them, so that no harmful ideas are creeping into the theology by poor choices. Again, a good anthropological knowledge about the culture and world view of the language community make this work much more feasible. The trouble with these key terms is that once poorly chosen, the community usually shows great resistance to changing them to something more suitable. Therefore, even with non-written approaches to Bible translation, there is no shortcut leading around a diligent process for selecting the key terms.

Software and computers

Computers are now indispensible tools for Bible translations. Many of the process steps in the previous sections are nowadays made easier by the use of specialized software that allows typing languages with different letters from those provided by the ASCII range, that helps to keep track of the various drafts, that facilitates the consistency, and that does 90% of the work of type-setting. Experienced Bible translators agree nowadays that everything works much, much faster with the computer, with the important drawback that everything also takes a lot longer. Why so? Computers create their own kind of problems that you wouldn't have without them, and they are pressed on people who often did not even have an electric outlet in their house before they joined the translation team. Bible translation software is notoriously fickle, with many things that can and do go wrong. It requires IT support that may often be hundreds of kilometers away in the capital. Much of the time computers are grounded because of dust getting into the system, deteriorated batteries, or bugs, both natural or software-related. Virus protection needs to be kept up to date, and software subscriptions need to be sustained. And of course the translation teams need to be thoroughly trained in the use of all this hard- and software.

Translation project management

The people working on a translation project need more than just software support. For many of them, translation is their only and full-time employment, so they rely on their salaries being paid in good time. They need to account for their work, require supervision and staff care, and someone needs to create the work plan that gets them going so that there are no bottlenecks with regard to consultant and IT support. Most translators are backed by one of the churches in the language community, so good relations need to be established with each involved church. The reviewers need to be selected and assigned to their tasks, and they also need to be oriented into their work.

On a higher level it needs people who oversee the interaction of the organization with the individual projects, who set standards and make sure they are being adhered to, and who provide the financial and HR infrastructure. Courses and workshops need to be organized, and travels need to be arranged. The interaction with linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and literacy experts needs to be organized.

Since Bible translation has never been financially sustainable in and of itself, it relies on donors who support it generously. They rightfully require timely reports about the activities they finance, which creates another layer of administration without which Bible translation is unthinkable.

External relations

Way too often did it happen that a Bible translation had been completed, often after a very long time of hard work, and handed over to the language community and its church, just to realize that afterwards nobody was using it. There may be a number of reasons for this, some of which we need to discuss in other blog entries. But often the issue was not a lack of quality, but a lack of either awareness or motivation among the language community. When the community realizes that there is now a translation only after the work is done, it is usually too late to get them to appreciate it. So a lot needs to happen beside the pure translation work to make sure that the community is not only aware of this work, but that it is eagerly looking forward to its completion. This is the kind of Scripture-engagement work that needs to be part and parcel of each translation project, and no project should be planned without it. This requires good relationships with the various churches of the language area, including good personal relationships between the team and the various pastors and church elders. It requires a high visibility of the team, and a steady flow of early products of the translated Scriptures into the community. 

Another important area of keeping the relationships stable are the authorities. In many countries it is actually the government that has the final say over the orthography and other language development issues. On the flip side, the local authorities may also be valuable assets in promoting language development. In other countries the government attitude may be less enthusiastic, and sometimes, if you can, it may be best to just stay below the radar. If so, you may have more difficulties to promote the Bible translation openly in the community.

Take the complexity seriously!

These are just a number of the complexities that affect a Bible translation project. Some of them have been combined into short paragraphs, where entire blog entries need to be written about individual aspects of them (and I intend to do so, in some cases). My sincere hope is that it becomes clear that Bible translation is an endeavour that needs to be taken seriously, that requires the right people to be involved, with the best possible training, using the best available tools, and doing their work in the optimal order, so that in the end a translation can be used by the community that is easy to read, natural, clear and accurate. We should not contemplate any thought that just because these people are living in remote places with fewer resources, they should settle in their daily interaction with the Word of God for less quality than we demand for ourselves. They deserve an approach that fully acknowledges this complexity and does its best to come to a high-end product.

Bible translation needs to be done right at the first attempt

 ...because there won't be another for many years!

In the past few years a pithy adage was increasingly heard in Bible translation circles: "Publish Early and Publish Often!"

The idea behind this comes from recent technology advances that make publications in small numbers a lot more affordable, and which drives the business model of several web-based companies. Now what is the connection to Bible translation? The thought is that it is not at all that damaging to publish a Bible translation, even if it has not been produced according to the best standards and is presumably full of errors, mistakes and unnatural expressions. To the contrary, a spirited release of a Bible after a shorter production period will already be the first step toward collecting feedback for the next, much better release. Just like in the software business, a first release will generate welcome improvements, and there may even develop a lively publication cycle that will result in ever more perfected translations over the years. The important thing is to get started, and have the Bible in the hands of the people, even if we know it is not perfect.

Now it is not surprising that the "publish early – publish often" credo is most frequently recited by those who campaign for a more urgent approach to Bible translation. It is brought up as the last line of defense, after all the objections about not enough training for the translators, not having sufficient quality-control measures, nor an appropriate linguistic foundation, nor a tested orthography, have been patiently listened to. "So what", is the response, "if the result, which of course we don't expect, should indeed not be usable to the community, then, hey, we just have them revise it!"

The problem with the "publish early – publish often" approach is that it is seriously flawed in the Bible translation context. The New Testament is not a software product where everybody warmly welcomes changes as improvements. There are several reasons for this.

• Especially when there already is a Christian presence in the language community, there is an expectation regarding the nature of God's Word. It is rightly seen as something holy and unchangeable. Add to that the stern warnings of Revelation 22, and it needs a lot of convincing that the Bible needs revision shortly after it was published. Expect resistance, plus an uncomfortable astonishment that the very people who first pushed for the translation of the Bible are now the ones who don't take it serious once it is finished.

• There may be for a long time a lack of awareness that something is wrong with the Bible translation. Again expectations play a huge part in this: Before the translation the Bible was a supposedly important, but also difficult to understand book, written in another language. Some people from the language community may actually speak that other language and find that the Bible there also sounds very strange, certainly not the way people talk normally. This must be the very nature of how God talks to believers – probably it is not there to be easily understood. It requires a style of speech out of the every-day language, and normal speech structures may actually be inappropriate for the Bible. If this sounds strange to you: this is exactly what I thought as a young Christian, being used to the old and awkward translations that were around in Germany before the publication of the German Good News Bible. When this came out, I adopted and liked it immediately, but even then I thought that it must be some kind of frivolous adaptation of the Bible for young people like me, a sort of accommodation leaving behind for a while how it should really sound, until I finally graduate to the use of the proper Bibles! It took me some years to fully grasp that the people of the Bible and even God did indeed talk normally at their time. So with this background it may be clearer why the first readers of a new Bible translation kind of expect it to sound weird and attribute all of their failures to engage with the text to their lack of capacity. Not only will they not see the problem, they will also for a while resist the proposed solution of a quick revision, coupled with the reasons brought up under the first bullet point. Indeed, they may insist that it is not right for the Bible to be easily understood!
  

• And then there is the matter of shame. Culturally, it is most inappropriate in many communities to criticize the product of someone's hard work, particularly when this hard work took years to come to fruition, and is a work for the community. There is this huge dedication event at the end of a Bible translation project where the workers of the translation team are celebrated as spiritual heroes, who after many struggles succeeded in bringing God's Word to the community. And then, shortly thereafter, somebody comes along and says "oh, you know, well done, but it's actually quite buggy, and it seems we have to start a revision right away, as there are so many things wrong with it!" In those situations that I know in my part of Africa, such a situation is unthinkable to such a degree that I have never heard of it. Speedy (and that means: inside of ten or twenty years) revisions just don't happen, unless they are motivated by other factors, such as a drastic change in writing system forced by the government. In most situations, there is no other way than to wait until the original translators have passed away, and then some, so that neither they nor their families are subjected to this shame.

• One particular aspect that may call for a revision is the thorny matter of orthography. Nowadays Bible translations are frequently published without any serious phonological research, no understanding of the prosodic features of the language, and with an orthography that in the most superficial way tries to copy the conventions of the national language. In short course after the publication it becomes clear that nobody wants to or even can read this. It may easily be the most significant factor for Bible translations remaining on the shelves, but even in these situations the resistance to revision is usually insurmountable. In fact, orthographies and Bible translations have this thing in common: the communities behind them resist change even in the face of the strongest evidence that change would be good.

One doesn't need to go to places like Africa and Asia to see this happen. Around the turn of the century there was a feeble attempt to reform the German orthography. All ambitious plans to make some changes that would actually help in making the German writing system less opaque were swiftly flipped off the agenda by "concerned citizens" who used such infallible arguments such as "Goethe would turn over in his grave if he knew about this." In the end, only a few cosmetic changes were left, and even those caused riots (tame, of course, we are Germans, after all) and civil disobedience when people realized that they were indeed faced with a change, how ever inconsequential it may have been. I think we can all tell similar stories about resistance to orthography changes in the places we come from. Rational thinking usually does not come into it. From my experience as an orthography advisor in Ethiopia, where I worked on a good number of languages, it makes no difference that these languages were only written for a few years. Whatever system is in place at a given time is quite apparently God-given and therefore not negotiable, no matter what the reasons may be.

We all know this also regarding the Bible translations in our languages. The "King-James-Only" movement in English-speaking countries is a stark reminder that we should not expect to have an easy job selling the need for a revision in a language community where the education levels are on average much lower than in the English-speaking Church.

The upshot of all this is: Forget about the idea of making frequent revisions part of your strategy to improve Bible translations when they have not come out right at the first shot. It won't work, and the language community will be stuck with whatever is going to be published first. There will, in all likelyhood, not be a second chance for generations to come. Too often this may mean that either no-one reads the Bible in that language, or, if they do, it does not have the impact of fostering a spiritually flourishing community.

This is not to say that all publication must wait until the product is perfect. It will never be, and we know that, too, from our favorite translations in our mother tongues. We are shooting for solid, useful translations in the global Bible translation movement, and these are possible if the tried and trusted procedures are applied, if quality control is taken serious, if there is a solid linguistic foundation, if the translators are well trained in the things they really need to know for their technical work. But these things take time, more time than donors and implementing organizations are currently inclined to give to the translation teams.

 

Bible translation is a technical task, not a spiritual one

 

When Cameron Townsend in the 1920s was involved with translating the Bible into the Kaqchikel language in Guatemala, he noticed that he had much to learn from the then emerging discipline of modern linguistics. By no means was he the first modern missionary doing Bible translation, but he was the first who realized that Bible translation is an endeavour that requires more than just a good evangelical heart, a desk, a dictionary, and a patient mind. He therefore first founded the Summer Institute of Linguistics and later, to support the former, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. These organizations were to do Bible translation with a strong technical foundation, with a thorough grounding in linguistics, anthropology, theology and translation studies.

Throughout the 20th century, this approach to Bible translation dominated the landscape. Bible translators tended to be people who were comfortable at academic conferences, published linguistic articles, regularly met at workshops, spent a lot of time training the next generation of translators, and were following elaborate sets of strict standards that governed how translation could happen, what products needed to be in place before it could happen, and what quality-control measures needed to be applied to ensure successful translation. In short, these people understood that they were involved in a technical endeavour, and they behaved accordingly.

At the same time, these were also immensely spiritual people, meeting daily for prayer meetings before work, and who were keen to listen to God's input into their work by any means their individual theology allowed. After all, it was their strong faith that motivated them to invest their lives into this work, which they certainly saw as a spiritual enterprise to further God's Kingdom.

It is this spiritual motivation that may have led them into claiming for themselves that they were involved in a spiritual work, resulting in a spiritual product, and that requires foremost spiritual qualifications, in spite of all their technically-driven actions and routines during their work. And if we look how Bible translation is viewed by many of its supporters and decision makers in our generation, it may indeed appear as if the spiritual nature of the work has won out over the technical side. While a considerable amount of energy and time is invested in the spiritual growth and well-being of the translators, many of the standards, procedures and safeguards of the 20th century have fallen by the wayside. And why shouldn't they? If the assumption is correct that Bible translation is really God's work to which he has called us, then the best thing we can do to ensure good quality is to submit to God's leading, pray for wisdom and spirit-led decision making, and then charge onwards to do His work. What can possibly go wrong when we do just that?

Now, here I want to challenge the 21st-century assumption that Bible translation is foremost a spiritual task. I have to admit that throughout the past few decades I was prepared to allow for Bible translation to be both a spiritual and a technical task, but thinking about it for a bit longer even this idea doesn't hold. Bible translation is a technical task, in spite of its highly spiritual motivation, and in spite of the spiritual lifestyle of the practitioners.

In order to understand why, let's envision a Christian hospital – I may have to come back to this analogy a few more times while writing the entries to this blog. A Christian hospital is a hospital run by Christians, usually a church, out of a Christian motivation, such as showing God's love to the people around the church. Therefore, the motivation for this hospital is certainly spiritual, but the work in the hospital can only be described as technical, or, more specific, medical. The people who work in the hospital ideally will be trained medical practitioners, such as doctors, nurses, or physical therapists. These people work according to the standards they have learned in their training, and they are accountable to the patients and to the local authorities to ensure that their work satisfies these accepted standards. That is probably the best way to show God's love to the local people anyway. Now assume that, for some strange reason, the Christian governors of the hospital decide that from now on all the accepted best medical practices are no longer important, as it is now God's work only that is in focus in the hospital, and that such a spiritual approach would automatically lead to the best possible results anyway. It is not difficult to predict that this hospital, after a string of embarrassing scandals, will be forced to terminate its services in a very short time.

Now it still needs to be shown that Bible translation belongs into a similar category. One might want to argue that, because the object of the translation is the Word of God, Bible translation by definition must be foremost a spiritual endeavor, as the resulting product will (or will not) have the potential to spiritually affect the lives, if not the eternity, of its readers. If this were the case, I would, as a user of a Bible translation, have to clearly prefer the product of more spiritually driven translators, even if they have zero training and no understanding of the source language or the target language, the differences between the cultures, New Testament exegesis, and all the other technical factors that come to mind in translation. I would have to prefer their translation to one produced by non-believers of the highest technical standards. But would I, really? 

I have to admit that some people indeed reject Bible translations because they don't trust the spiritual credentials of the translators, so such choices are being made. But for me personally, there are some translations into my mother tongue German that I never, ever look at and for which I know for a fact that they have been created by the most godly people you can think of. They just weren't competent Bible translators, often without any kind of training – and it shows. On the other hand, there are some translations where I wouldn't exactly vouch for the orthodoxy of all the translators involved, but which are technically as good as any other German translation, and I use these translations a lot. (Let me quickly point out that there are a number of excellent German Bible translations which were done by sound Christians, and I read those, too)

Okay, you may with some justification now claim that if I allow my personal Bible translation experience to be poisoned by the products of doubtful translators, then it should be no surprise that my understanding of Bible translation itself is tainted, as is this blog. But I think there are good reasons for me to uphold my position.

Firstly, it is the Word of God itself that provides spiritual weight to the work of a Bible translator. And this was written in Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew. The job of the translator is to get this spiritual treasure across into another language. Just as a printer of a Bible edition needs to apply his best knowledge and skills to create a readable, durable and clean book containing the Bible, in the same way the translator needs to apply the tools of his trade to get the Word of God published in a new form. Not the book in itself is holy, because it contains the Word of God, and not the translation as such is in any way more or less spiritual. But depending on the skill of the printer, the book is either lousy or nice, and depending on the translators' skill, the translation has a high quality or not. I submit that the prayer-life or theological soundness of the printer or the translators does not have much of an impact on the quality of the product, surely a lot less than their technical capacity.

Secondly, even in today's Bible translation movement it is accepted that not all translations can be produced by strong believers. Depending on the geographical and religious context of the language community, the Bible is often either translated by non-believers, or not at all. For these translators this work may feel as a technical challenge, often also as a service to the language community, but they see no spiritual value in it themselves. Still it is hoped that their work will eventually become a rich spiritual blessing to many, which is certainly more likely if it is of a high technical standard.

So it is really the craftsmanship, knowledge and skills of the translators that have the most lasting impact on the quality of a Bible translation – in short: their technical abilities. I will pursue in other blog entries the question how this technical capacity is achieved, and what areas of expertise need to be part of it so that a translator can be technically proficient.

All this, as I hope is still clear, does not mean that I advocate in any way for non-believers or heretics to become involved in Bible translation. In most situations over the past few centuries this has always been a mute point anyway: Bible translators for the most part have been Christians, which is exactly what motivated them to undertake this work. My point, up to now, was entirely to submit to the discussion the statement that Bible translation is a technical task, more than anything else we may wish to call it. This statement, if it survives the discussion, has implications on what I will write in future entries. My observation is that in the current environment Bible translation is not treated as a technical task, which leads to quite a number of unintended and unpalatable consequences.

Welcome!

 

This blog is directed at practitioners, supporters or donors of the Bible translation movement – if you count yourself as part of this target group, you are most welcome to read on, and to discuss the presented statements with me and with others who may also find their way to this blog.

Statements on Bible Translation is intended to grow to become a collection of entries that each focus on a different proposition that I hold to be true about Bible translation, but that, apparently, needs to be defended in today's Bible translation environment. Starting this blog, I have no clear idea how many of these statements are going to be needed, but eventually, I will reach a point where I will have no more statements to add – so I expect a finite number of entries.

For now I plan entries on the following statements (and these entries might be produced in different orders):

• Bible translation is a technical task, not a spiritual one.
• Bible translation is a complex task.
• Bible translation requires a solid linguistic foundation that feeds into the work of the translators.
  
• Bible translation can be done well, and it can be done badly, and anything in between.
• Bible translation requires well-trained people.
• Bible translation requires focus.
• Bible translation is mission, and often needs missionaries.
  
• Bible translation usually does not happen through the Church, but in spite of the Church.
• Bible translation is best done by para-church organizations.
• Partnerships are necessary means for Bible translation.
• Bible translation should not be done with a hand tied to the back.
• Bible translation cannot be planned like a well-drilling project.
• Bible translation needs a long-term commitment, not only by the translators, but also from donors and partners.
• Bible translation needs to be done right at the first attempt, because there won't be another for many years.
  
• Bible translation is not the way to speed up the second coming of Jesus.
• The most crucial resource for Bible translation is not money, but expertise.
• Bible translation strategy requires technical experts to be among the decision makers.
  
• Bible translations already exist where the language community has the capacity to do it without external help.
• Rushing Bible translation means to delay it for generations to come. 

Why this blog?

In 1989, I joined the Bible translation movement – as a candidate of Wycliffe Germany, and of SIL International. In 1999, after a long time as a candidate, I finally started work with SIL Ethiopia – first as an advisor in a language development project that I hoped would turn into a translation project, and then as a linguistics consultant.

Since I started out with Wycliff and SIL, a lot of things happened in the global Bible translation movement. Many of these things are good, but I also observed several developments that I am not so positive about. These are the things I want to write about here. It is not so easy to find a place and a format where these kinds of things can be discussed, as the usual venues of discussion, at least in my organizations, have tended to disappear over the past few decades.

In my observation, many of the not so fortunate developments since the turn of the century can be traced back to certain assumptions that have been adopted by decision makers and supporters of the Bible translation movement, and therefore I see it as beneficial when these assumptions can be contrasted with statements that I think provide a more helpful understanding.

Some groundrules

I'm very new to doing blogs, so I'm not exactly sure what will be in my power to do or not to do as the owner of this blog. But I want this to be a safe place for everybody, even for people who disagree with me.

Let me therefore state that whatever misgivings I may have about the current direction of the Bible translation movement, I do not trace them back to any assumed deliberate ill will by any of the participants. Whoever volunteers to contribute to the task of Bible translation by giving their time, resources, money, energy, prayers, or thinking, in my opinion does so out of the genuine desire to further the Great Commission in the best possible way. Like I do. It is unavoidable that in the course of this differing opinions develop, each of which deserve to be taken seriously. They need to be discussed calmly without any assumptions of bad faith. This should also hold for this blog, where I hope that some vigorous discussions should develop, but in the spirit of careful listening. Discussions should be directed at the strength of any argument, but not at the people behind it.

I will therefore monitor the exchange happening on this blog, and if I observe that people do not follow this desired behavior, I will kindly ask them to change their contributions in a way that they are less offensive to others. Only when this leads nowhere will I remove statements that I judge to be below the standards that I want to set here – even if it's people that I agree with. This is more likely to happen when someone else is attacked in an inappropriate way, less so myself, since I am the one putting out bold statements here, and I should be able to take some heat because of that.

Knowing myself, I may be the worst offender in this, and I urge you to let me know when my wordings are not according to my own rules. Bear with me when I sometimes use strong verbal images to drive home a point, and try not to be offended when you feel yourself under attack as part of a group that I state is moving in the wrong direction. Instead, let me see where I am wrong by responding to the argument that I make, and you may even convince me.

I may come back to this page once in a while to amend some of the things I said here, or to add to them – depending on how things develop in the discussions.

Some important disclaimers

1. Although I am working in the Bible translation movement under SIL Global and Wycliffe Germany, this blog is entirely my private endeavour that I pursue during my spare time. None of the statements I make here, and none of my contributions in any discussion, claims to represent the perspective of these two organizations.
2. This may sound odd now: I have never translated a verse of the Bible in my life, except when I studied Greek in 1989. My work in the translation movement is that of a linguist, a linguistics consultant, and as a trainer, often of translators and translation consultants. By all means, you are welcome to assume that I have no idea what I am talking about. I do claim, however, that I do know the basic processes in a translation project, that I have observed a good number of translation projects over the years, and that I have talked to countless practitioners about what is going on in their projects.
   
3. All of my statements are published here under a Creative Commons license BY-SA – which means that you can distribute this content wherever you like, for whatever purpose you like, as long you give an attribution to this blog and share it under the same conditions.