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.