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.

 

Note: I need to add here that of course it is good and current best practice in Bible translation projects to make test runs of translated scripture portions in small numbers – these do not count as publications, and are a normal part of the translation and community review process. It is clearly communicated to the test-readers and reviewers that the wordings here are subject to change, and that this is not (yet) an authoritative version of God's Word.