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.
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