Bible translation requires well-trained people

 

After some of the things I wrote in previous entries, it shouldn't come as a surprise that in my opinion training is of crucial importance for Bible translation. And I doubt that too many people would disagree with me here, as almost everybody I talk to professes placing a high value on training Bible translators. But before you relax and think that here, finally, we have found a topic where things are going well, I need to disillusion you. Training Bible translators has not been a success story over the past few decades. What then could have gone wrong?

Before we go there, let's briefly reinforce the idea that well-trained people are indispensable for Bible translation. If it is indeed in its substance a technical task, then it follows that the people doing it should be technically competent to do their work. And the work of a Bible translation project has many facets: there needs to be a well-trained administrative force behind it, so that all personnel and resources are sustainably in place when and where they are needed; linguists need to figure out the structure of the target language and inform the translators about the important features in translation; the translators need to be able to fully comprehend the meaning of the source texts, and therefore they need to confidently use the many tools that help with this task; consultants have the knowledge and experience to make sure that the translated texts comply with minimal standards; a suitable orthography needs to be developed and taught to a critical mass of people; the differences between biblical culture and target culture need to be well understood; everybody in the team needs to understand the many different steps and individual procedures of the translation process; somebody needs to be able to keep all the software and hardware running that are now inevitably part of a project. And you could probably name a good number of other skills and proficiencies that can make or break a translation effort.

It is good to remember the analogy of the Christian hospital that I already invoked a couple of times. Even if the motivation for running the hospital is spiritual, most people there have medical jobs, and they need to be competent in their roles. That does not mean that everyone needs to be a medical doctor with solid university-level knowledge of all anatomic regions of the human body. Instead, even among the doctors there are many different specializations. Outside of the doctors' academically trained workforce there are even more very different tasks that all require high-level professionalism, such as nurses (again, many specializations among them), PTAs, physiotherapists, nutritionists, pharmacists, medics, instrument cleaners, administrators, drivers etc. Whatever job anyone is doing requires usually years of training, a rigid certification, and the confidence that they know what they are doing in their work.

It is possible for completely untrained people to join the workforce, but they won't do anything meaningful on their own unless they learn enough to pass a number of examinations that demonstrate their competence. This, again, normally takes years, depending on their intended role.

I assume the same to be true in Bible translation. Not every member of a translation project needs to be fully trained in everything, but we would want the following two conditions to hold true in any given situation:

• Nobody works independently in a role for which he or she is not sufficiently trained.
• For every needed role someone is trained to do it.

Although most everybody in the Bible translation movement would probably agree with this, many current projects look very different, which means that there are several problems with training. We are not training anywhere near enough people, we don't train them enough, we don't train them in the technical competencies, we train them in the wrong language, and we train them with the wrong outcome in mind. This is what I mean:

We are not training enough people

Over the last 20 years an impressive amount of Bible translation projects has been started, hundreds of them. In the same period hundreds of experienced Bible translators, linguists, literacy experts, anthropologists, administrators, consultants, mentors, and technical supporters have left the Bible translation movement – usually into retirement, because the workforce had grown rather old. Very few of them have been replaced by new arrivals from the traditional sending countries, as recruitment has gone down to a trickle, and in fact most of the training centers for Bible translators from those countries have been closed down for lack of students.

This was not seen as necessarily a bad thing, as it confirmed the perception that mission has turned from an endeavor "from the West to the Rest" to one from "everywhere to everywhere", with "everywhere" usually excluding "the West." This may have worked out if the process had been bolstered by a principled effort to train local personnel to the point where they could take over all the tasks that foreigners did in the past, but this did not really happen. While there was always a credible push to train translators and translation consultants for their work in Bible translation, the other roles were never really presented as possible avenues for locals to work in Bible translation. Therefore, there are now very few well-trained local linguists, literacy workers or anthropologists in the workforce. All these roles are critical for Bible translation, but the number of local certified consultants in these fields is too embarrassingly low to write down here. They have just never been trained, and now there are not many people left to train them.

We don't train the upcoming workforce enough

Not only have many of the old training centers in North America and Europe closed shop over the last decades, those that still stand often have shortened the training to a point where the new recruits don't come to the field as "specialists" anymore, but as "interns" that still need to grow in experience and that need to undergo follow-up training when the opportunity arises. The curriculum of training courses in many cases only teaches the bare basics, and much of what has been compulsory training content for all Bible translators 30 years ago has nowadays fallen to the wayside. The recruits will never learn this, no matter what training avenue they take.

The situation is similar for the training courses I know about in Africa, where the local translation workforce is supposed to be trained. The training courses are short, and they leave out a lot of what had once been held to be indispensable knowledge for Bible translators. Linguistics, for example, is not part of the package anymore except for very rudimentary introductions that prepare the students for nothing.

We don't train them in technical competencies

To the same extent that the training courses got truncated in length, they also got saddled with non-technical content that crowds out the technical content from the few curriculum slots that are still left. Instead of teaching the students about tone languages, nowadays this time is used to give a thorough introduction into intercultural service methods; where students in the old days learned about clause combinations, they now have lessons on partnering and missiology.

I'm not about to demand that these things are no longer taught to new recruits, but when we allow the non-technical content to displace the technical content in our already too short technical preparation courses without providing other opportunities, then we need to expect that our new staff is not competent for the job. This is often our situation today, and I heard this from frustrated consultants from many places in the world (not just in Africa), where incoming staff had no exposure to crucial knowledge and skills training in their preparation time and therefore failed to do the tasks for which they are on paper prepared.

The irony about this is that the non-technical content that has been added to the technical prep-courses is going to hit the newcomers several times in their preparation and even after they arrive on the field, as these things are very high on so many peoples' agendas that everybody makes sure that nobody falls through the cracks here. But many countries nowadays don't even have a sufficiently trained linguist anymore that could teach the new arrivals the linguistics content they did not learn in their training.

We train them in the wrong language

These days, practically all technical training happens in English (or, at best, French and Spanish). English is the perfect language to use for everybody who speaks it as mother tongue, and for those second-language speakers who enjoyed a long and successful academic career in English. But this is by far not everybody who wants to join the Bible translation workforce. From my experience in Africa, in many places English is the nominal language of secondary and tertiary education, but the proficiency levels of students are so low that they really don't function in this language. Similarly fare European students from countries where the education system happens fully in another national language, but at least they have much better chances of learning English in helpful ways before they undergo their Bible translation training – as happened in my case.

It is not surprising to see how much students in Africa struggle to absorb content that is thrown at them in English. This is even more the case when their initial education didn't go beyond eighth or tenth grade schooling, which is often the baseline freshly recruited translation workers start out from in the remote and neglected languages that still have a translation need. They would be much better served to get their training in a language that is closer at heart to them, but this doesn't happen for several reasons.

One is that a linguistics or translation curriculum doesn't exist in any other language but English, Spanish or French. Other national languages (as I experienced with Amharic in Ethiopia) don't have a fully developed linguistic terminology, and we don't have the trainers who are fluent enough in these languages to create the content. My finger points here directly at myself, as in my 25 years working in Ethiopia, I never reached that level in Amharic to remedy this.

We train them with the wrong outcome in mind

Another reason why we train local personnel in English, French or Spanish is the idea that this training will result in tangible academic qualifications that will help the students to gain accreditation for further education. This idea is so entrenched everywhere in the global Bible translation movement that even those who agree with me on most of my other ideas don't want to challenge it. Good training needs to lead to academic credentials: diplomas, degrees, doctorates. And therefore it needs to happen in these major languages, although it prevents the students from learning what they need to know.

Instead, I submit that training for the Bible translation workforce primarily needs to lead to better skills and relevant knowledge for the job these people have to do. Questions of accreditation therefore need to take a backseat compared to the need to transfer the content and abilities the trainees really need to do their daily work as translators well. And this would also imply that we provide this training in languages that work better for the people as medium of instruction.

If someone is trained to work well, and does so over the course of a project, this person will then later be ready to attack an academic degree in an accreditable language, often in a more suitable institution, so the opportunity to progress academically will always be there for anybody who has the potential for it.

Learning on the job

It is not realistic to assume that the local workforce is going to start their work fully and adequately trained, and this is not what I have in mind here. We need to accept that most people who join a project don't know what they need to do. This is fine if we can make them learn what they need while they are doing their job. This is the tried and trusted system of master and apprentice, where someone with skills, knowledge and experience passes all of this on to someone less skilled, knowledgeable and experienced. Someone who learns in this way will probably be a lot more relevantly trained than someone who takes courses at a college or a university. But this system can only work if there is some experienced, skilled and knowledgeable person on the team to learn from. If a team consists entirely of apprentices who took a small number of two-week modules, then no experience or skills will ever be transferred, and all knowledge will quickly evaporate in the daily grind.

Bible translation is not the way to speed up the second coming of Jesus

 

This may appear to be a very odd topic for this blog, and indeed it is, any way you slice it. But it has been reported to me that much of the current motivation to speed up Bible translation stems from the earnest desire of some Christians in North America (and possibly elsewhere) to do their utmost to put in place what they think to be the conditions for Jesus' second coming. I have to admit upfront that I don't have any documentary evidence for this, so I would be very happy to hear from the readers that I am barking up the wrong tree with this blog post. Feel free to disavow me of this idea in the comments below, and as soon as you convince me, I'll gladly remove this post from my blog. If on the other hand you have clear evidence that what I say here is based on facts, please let me know. Depending on how public this evidence is, we might link to it here.

So what is the basic idea here? Because I write this blog to a Christian audience, I don't need to explain the concept of the second coming of Christ – it should be a central idea in everybody's theology. But it is also clear that there are many and widely differing ideas as to how this second coming of Christ influences and motivates what we do with our lives. There is probably a lot of common ground for most Christians, but also some theologies that are not widely shared, or even contested by the majority of our fellow believers. One such view is that Christians all over the world should act in ways that would speed up the second coming of Christ. If we therefore can identify a condition that needs to be met before Jesus' return can happen, we should do our best to make sure it is met as soon as possible.

One such condition that is frequently brought up in this context is the perceived need that all peoples of the world have heard the Good News of Jesus. This is based on Jesus' own words in Matthew 24:14: "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come."

In our times, this prophecy is frequently understood to mean that a Bible translation needs to be available for every language. If correct, this would indeed imply that speeding up the work of translating the Bible into all languages can hasten the long-awaited return of Christ. If we therefore can control some variables, such as the number of project start-ups and time needed for project completion, we have it in the hand to present Jesus with a world which is ready for him to come back to much earlier than if we did not pay attention to these things.

I think there are a number of objections that can be brought forward against this idea, which I hope will convince you that we should not let ourselves be driven by a wrong sense of urgency into doing a worse job of Bible translation than necessary.

Before I do this, though, I want to point out clearly that the Bible leaves no doubt about the fact that Jesus will come back at the end of times – it is not my intention at all to question this here or even ridicule those who believe it. I am one of them, and I take the passages that talk about this future event very seriously. Differences arise though about how we as Christians are to lead our lives with respect to the second coming of Christ.

Together with many other Christians I may be tempted to be actually not that keen on being there when it happens, but rather die peacefully before that event – there are just too many indications that it won't be a very pleasant time, not only for non-believers, but also for Christians. But let me join in with John at the very end of the Bible in Rev. 22: "Come Lord Jesus!"  Whatever that may mean for me personally, I'd rather see this sooner than later.

But can we read from the Bible any obligation for us to actually do things to make it happen faster? No matter how much I look for it, I can't find it anywhere. There is basically one clear command with regard to Jesus' return: "Be ready for it!" We are called to live our lives in ways that make us not to appear embarrassed when the time of the return finally comes. If we look at the parable of the ten virgins in Matt. 25, the five wise ones do not recommend themselves by going to the homestead of the bridegroom and drag him by his hairs to the wedding, so that it can finally get started; they just stay prepared for his arrival for however long it takes. There is of course the Great Commission that exhorts Christians to spread the Good News until the end of the world, but once more, in doing it, there is no obligation whatsoever to second-guess God's strategy by doing X, Y or Z because it needs to be done before Jesus can come back.

Now how do we know that each language needs to have a Bible translation before the big event can happen? In fact, we don't, at least not from the Bible. Admittedly, there is a correlation between having a Bible translation and having a better chance of reaching an ethnic group with the good news, but to draw the conclusion that Matt 24:14 can only take place when Bible translations are ready for all languages gets us into the area of conjecture. To be sure, the concept of Bible translation isn't even mentioned once in the New Testament, and we know from Acts 2 that God isn't in the least bit limited by the absence of a Bible translation when it comes to reaching people from many nations. More importantly, the writers of the New Testament were all of the opinion that Jesus might come back any minute, even in their days, so they must have had ideas on how Matt 24:14 might be fulfilled that apparently did not involve Bible translation. Paul writes to the Thessalonians who were rather distraught by the fact that Christians started dying of old age before Jesus returned, and it appears as if that came as a somewhat unexpected delay even for Paul. The writer of Hebrews also expects in 10:25 that Jesus' return is just around the corner, much closer than it was in the early days of the church 20 or 30 years earlier – again, he did not feel that something was critically missing in the world that could possibly prevent that.

So, almost 2000 years later, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation: Jesus could come back any moment, and we should not assume for a minute that the conditions are not yet ready for this – this is exclusively for Jesus to decide. Our job is to be ready ourselves (that would be a totally different blog to talk about that), and not to speed up any mission milestone that our eschatological thinking tells us needs to be reached first.

All this is not to say that Bible translation shouldn't happen, or that it is not a good idea to look for ways to speed the work up by acceptable measures. There are some intrinsically good reasons why the world would be a better one when everybody could read the Bible in a well-understood language. This is the case ten minutes or ten thousand years before the return of Jesus. If we accept that, then we will also be ready to invest what it takes to make each Bible translation a good one that truly communicates God's good news even to the smallest ethnic group. Botching the job because we feel we must hurriedly push a timeline does not further God's Kingdom, but in effect will delay the day when all nations are finally reached.

Bible translation can be done well, and it can be done badly, and anything in between

 

Much of what I'm going to write here is a direct consequence of what was expressed in other blog entries. If Bible translation really is a complex task, if it is indeed more technical in nature than spiritual, and if it does require a serious amount of linguistic knowledge, then it shouldn't be too surprising to find out that some Bible translations come across as nice pieces of work, whereas others don't. We all know this to be true, because no matter what we think about Bible translation methodology, we are very happy to read one or two particular English translations, very dissatisfied with a number of other English translations, and we probably don't have much of a strong opinion regarding many others. The English Bible translation landscape gives us a lot of options to choose from, which is great.

There can be a number of reasons why we dislike certain Bible translations, and not all of them can be traced back to the translators doing a less than perfect job. The team may have put in a technically credible effort, though following a translation methodology that I don't agree with. Or they may have chosen a style that I don't find appropriate, but that resonates with lots of other readers.

But here it is: with any translation approach, there is the possibility to do it in a good way and in a bad way. And before I continue down this road, it is very important for me to state firmly that I don't want to use this blog post to needlessly bash someone else's earnest effort to create something valuable. Today's painful subject is a necessary one to talk about, especially because it is so easy to get ourselves into a warm fuzzy feeling that because someone is motivated and doing something with a potential spiritual impact, God will automatically grant success to their hard work. This is usually not the case with technical tasks – for them to turn out well, competence is required. If I lack competence as a translator, any of the following things may happen:

• I fail to realize that my mother tongue works in very different ways from the language I translate from, and therefore I too often copy structures of the source language that communicate something very different in the target language – if they communicate anything at all.
• I may be inconsistent in spelling things, and therefore the same words are spelled in different ways even on the same page. The reader would not know for sure that this is indeed the same word.
  
• I do not dare to use good and colorful idiomatic expressions of my language in the translation, because they deviate too far in form from the expression in the source language.
• I translate sentence by sentence and therefore fail to compose the paragraphs and even the whole text in a way that the logical structures become clear.
• I have no idea how to activate a larger vocabulary for the translation, and therefore everything comes across as bland and boring, often also with hazily-defined meanings.
• My English ability is not sufficient to benefit from the commentaries and translation guides that exist, so there may be some misunderstandings and wrong interpretations creeping into the translation.
• I have no clear picture as to how the Biblical culture differs from my own culture, so I cannot provide clues in the translation that help with seeing things in the correct light.
• I may have a quirky theological understanding and let this flow into the translation in places where the text does not support my theology as much as I'd like.
  

All of these shortcomings in a translator or in a translation team can usually be overcome by training, although there is also a certain need for talent. But if we accept that training or the lack thereof are the critical resource that determines how successful someone translates, then it is indeed not justifiable to point our fingers at the translators when things are not as they should be. Rather, we need to ask ourselves why so little training has been given to the translators before they started their translation work. Maybe training has been given, but not in such a way that it could be absorbed by the translators.

Consequences of good and bad translations

It would be nice if we could consistently observe that good translations are always put to good use by the language community, and that bad translations are mostly ignored. But the reality is more complex. 

Unused bad translations

There are countless excellently made translations that are not being used in the churches and that nobody reads at home. So there are clearly other factors than just the quality of a translation that can lead to a Bible that is not in use. On the other hand, badly translated Bibles have indeed very little chance of being used by their communities – if understanding a passage requires a lot of oral explanation, if the orthography is at the point of being unreadable, if the language is boring the readers to tears, there is very little chance that the Bible is going to become a bestseller among the Christians. So good quality in translation is almost a necessary condition for a well-used Bible, but it is not the only one.

This gets us to the problem that it may not be that easy for us to determine how good a translation really is. The potential users in the language community quite often are not in a position to tell us about it – they just don't know how to distinguish a good translation from a bad one. I wrote in a different entry that first time Bible readers in their language may not be unduly alarmed when their translation doesn't make much sense to them, as this is what they were led to expect from a holy and religious text. It usually comes as a surprise to Bible readers when they finally realize that most Biblical texts were written in a rather clear and mundane language.

Abused bad translations

This may also lead to the few situations where truly poor attempts at translation may still have an impact among the Christians of a community. They are excited that finally God's word has come to them, and they use it in spite of it not clearly communicating. These are really tragic situations, because they have the potential that the translation has a net negative impact on the community. If good content is not consistently and sufficiently getting across the language and culture divide, then it may be overshadowed by the undesirable things that come out of a badly done translation:

• Severe theological misunderstandings because of unclear or even falsely translated passages.
• Simple and clear theological truths are not gleaned from the biblical texts.
• Unnecessary discussions and dissent among Christians about differing interpretations of unclear passages.
• The confirmation of the idea that God's word is not supposed to be a book that communicates easily, and that God in general prefers to not be understood by his followers.
• The abuse of the Bible as a kind of magical text where the correct recital of the form leads to higher blessings than the understanding of its content.

All of these things have indeed happened in church history to varying degrees, and Bible translators should attempt everything within their power to prevent them. This means that a translation can in fact be so bad that it would have been better if it never had been published – particularly if it is being used by the community. But these are the worst-case scenarios. Most poorly done translations are just not being read by the people, and that may be a blessing. 

Evaluating Bible translations

What I have written so far may give a different impression, but most translations are not clearly near one of the endpoints of a scale between stellar and abysmal. We all would agree that no translation is ever perfect, even in the best of circumstances. In the same way no sincerely created translation is devoid of any potential to be a blessing to some of its readers. Most translations are really a mixed bag with some light and some shadow. Some translators may have had a knack for finding good idiomatic expressions, but they may have been poor exegetes. Other translators show good understanding of cultural differences, but are found lacking in applying the structures of their own language. Others again do a credible job in all of that, but for their life cannot spell consistently. Some translations may be well done for some parts, and poorly done for others.

It would be quite nice if we had tried and tested ways to evaluate Bible translations for their quality, so that we had some clear guidance as to which Bible translations need to be redone or at least revised. Not that such revisions can be taken for granted, as we are guaranteed to face some resistance to any proposed revision, but at least we want and need to know where there is a definite need for such an expensive overhaul. Unfortunately, though, such ways to evaluate Bible translations do not really exist.

An important first step, though, has been taken by René van den Berg with his SURAM process. This methodology had some very useful results in Papua New Guinea with evaluating the impact of eleven Bible translations after a number of years after their publication. Sadly, the survey concluded that less than half of the translations enjoy good use in church contexts, and even less in non-church environments. It then tried to correlate this impact with a number of known factors about the translation projects. As it happened, though, all eleven translations were said to be of an adequate technical quality, and they were written in orthographies that were deemed to be readable. This only confirmed the idea stated above that technical competence is by far not the only factor in the success of a Bible translation. Unfortunately, no robust study exists to date that clearly correlates poor quality with low or even negative translation impact. To be frank, all the evidence that I claim to have to this effect is clearly anecdotal, although I am convinced that it is also representative.

Why is it that we don't have this data on quality and translation impact? There are a number of reasons for that:

• As stated above, it just doesn't do to go to the community and ask about the quality of their Bible translation. They are usually not in a position to give an objective assessment, as they probably never experienced quality Bible translation in a language they understand well.
• The linguistic quality of the Bible translation can only be assessed against any documented linguistic knowledge about the language. As this knowledge in most cases doesn't exist, the evaluators would be as much in the dark about the linguistic features of the language as the translators were when they translated.
• It may be possible to design some interview questions that may provide clues about the linguistic quality of the Bible translation – if there are many indications that the language of the translation sounds different from everyday language, is perceived as "holier" than what is said or written normally, if the readers have apparent difficulties to state some simple biblical truths – all that may show that the translation did not go too well from a technical perspective. Some reading experiments may show whether reading is fluent or requires constant false starts by the readers, which would point to orthography problems. But none of these things have been systematically designed for a principled evaluation process up to this point.
• Evaluating Bible translations is a touchy issue in an environment where Bible translation is undertaken by a large number of different agencies following sometimes radically different approaches. No current agency has the necessary standing to embark on such a politically and socially fraught endeavor.

All this is to say that, although it is quite clear that existing Bible translations and those that are currently worked on are likely to vary considerably in their quality, particularly in light of the many projects that are currently under way without any linguistic input, we just don't have much to go by when we want to evaluate a particular product. I believe this idea should become a priority of the worldwide Bible translation movement, so that we get a much clearer picture regarding how well each translation serves its intended language community. Right now we just charge ahead in the dark and hope for the best.

Bible translation requires a solid linguistic foundation

that feeds into the work of the translators

Image by NASA (in the public domain)

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” 

This statement by Nobel-price-winning physicist Richard Feynman after the disastrous explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 could be used as the underlying principle of what I want to explore in this post: the need to come to terms with reality in an undertaking as big as Bible translation.

In a previous post, I used a comparison with a Christian hospital to make it clear that Bible translation is a technical task, where the hospital is less affected in what it is doing by the spiritual motivation of its staff than by the nature of its task, the physical well-being of the beneficiaries. The connection to reality for the hospital workers in this task is medical science. Medical science provides scientific understanding of the human body, the bodily functions, excretions, interactions of organs and the ailments that can disrupt the proper work of the body. The diagnosis of illnesses, the triage of patients, the various steps of therapy, including surgery, medication or physical therapy – all this is entirely determined by the best current understanding of the worldwide community of medical practitioners, as manifested in countless journals and books, peer-reviewed studies and minutely documented experience. Add to this the myriad best practices surrounding a hospital, beginning from disciplined handwashing and instrument scrubbing all the way to the detailed regulations that determine the set-up of an operation theater or the nutrition plans of the hospital kitchen – none of that is in place without a long and documented history of people dying or getting ill as a consequence of sub-standard behavior. All of this is part of the knowledge provided by medical science. Working in a hospital means acquiring as much medical knowledge as is needed for a specific role, so that one can fulfill the established requirements of each situation.

Bible translation is, as I stated then, a task quite similar in nature. Although the motivation of the Bible-translation work force is usually not technical, the very nature of the task requires that the workers are prepared for the reality of the thing they are dealing with: human language. And just as medical science is the lens through which the workers in a hospital view the human body they need to work with, linguistics is the lens that enables Bible translators to successfully engage with the reality of the human language that is supposed to carry God's good message to a new community.

Some decision makers in the Bible translation movement are of the opinion that linguistics isn't all that important for good Bible translation if the translators are translating into their own mother tongue. Since they are expert speakers of their languages, they have inherently all they need to succeed in Bible translation, as long as they have sufficient training in exegetical principles and some translation basics. But this is about as true as claiming that the nurses in a hospital don't need medical training because they are expert users of their own bodies, and that the brain surgeon does not need to scientifically understand the human brain, because his successful use of his own brain for many decades inherently qualifies him to work at least on his own brain, if not on somebody else's. Whereas this idea would be seen as bizarre in a medical environment, it is currently a widely held position among people who fund or plan Bible translation projects.

This is not the time to go into the reasons why this assumption is held – there is most likely a mixture of what Feynman calls "public relations" and a genuine sense of urgency in the face of low resources that becomes more compromising with regard to standards and what is seen as an acceptable result. The point of this blog is to provide some evidence that the assumption that translation can be done without a thorough linguistic basis is far off the truth and leads to very undesirable results – nature can indeed not be fooled.

The orthography

The orthography is the way in which we write a language. For most languages, the orthography is more or less based on the sound system, which differs very much from language to language. Anyone who ever learned another language quickly becomes aware of the fact that this other language comes with sounds that are unknown to the learner, and that need extra practice. Less obvious is the contrary situation, where the other language doesn't make use of some sounds that are important to us. The crucial thing here is that an orthography for a new language needs to be carefully crafted along the lines of the sound system, because any mismatch between sounds and letters will require more effort in teaching, so that really bad orthographies (such as English) need twelve years of intensive teaching, whereas good orthographies can be learned within a school year. Needless to say, the small languages of the world won't ever have twelve years of schooling, so many Bibles in the world nowadays remain unread because there isn't anyone who can read them. Too many Bible translations are written in an orthography that is not aligned with the sound system at all and are therefore impossible to learn.

The lexicon

The Greek New Testament makes use of roughly 5500 different words (not counting any inflectional changes to the same word). About a third of these words only appear once throughout the whole New Testament, because they are used only infrequently. If you translate the NT into another language, you'd expect to have to find and use roughly as many different words of the target language to reach a similar lexical wealth as seen in the Greek original. If you stay significantly below that number, your translation will either be less precise or to the point in its choice of words, or it will come across as somewhat flat or bland. But collecting more than, say, 2000 words using regular language learning and analysis methods takes an extraordinarily long amount of time, because it is very difficult to encounter most of the infrequent words of a language in stories, texts or normal talk. Most mother-tongue speakers also have a limited active vocabulary, but a much larger passive vocabulary, so that even experienced translators have trouble finding good lexical expressions if they can't access a dictionary of their own language. Dictionaries, though, are not very high on the priority list of current Bible translation projects, and for most languages dictionaries that go beyond short word lists of less than 2000 words are non-existent.

By the way, there is a persistent myth that undeveloped languages have only very small vocabularies with just a few hundred words. This is probably related to the abovementioned difficulty of finding many words when there is just a very small corpus of texts, but the truth is that with the correct methodology it is entirely possible to identify 10,000 words, 15,000 words or even 20,000 words in basically any language, because in each language the speakers have the same needs to talk about everyday concepts as we do, and they certainly have the words for them. It is just an entirely different matter to command all these words in the process of translating, which is why so many translations fall short of the lexical depth of the original.

The grammar

A similar myth is propagated about the grammar of undeveloped languages: they are said to be devoid of grammatical rules, and the speakers basically talk in random and chaotic ways, without any kind of describable structure. And this myth is often not only believed by the outsiders, but even the speakers themselves are convinced that it is true and that grammatical order and rules can only be found in "real" languages like English or French, where they have so much trouble learning these rules. I have met a good number of Bible translators who were convinced that grammar was not a thing in their language.

Quite the opposite is true: Not only are there no languages in the world that do not follow grammatical rules to arrange stems and grammatical forms into well-formed words and sentences, but it appears that the smaller and more isolated a language is, the more likely it is that it maintained some grammatical distinctions in everyday use that observers speaking European languages find extremely fascinating and mind-boggling. A small community is apparently better suited to maintain structures that wouldn't survive long in a larger or even global language, and the best-trained linguists of the world have their work cut out for them to describe these amazing languages in terms that really do them justice. Have a look at this website to find (usually) recent examples of grammars that pursue this noble work.

An example of such a structure could be the dual, a grammatical form that was once used in Greek when it was an obscure dialect continuum spoken by a small ethnic federation on a peninsula in Southern Europe. When this language developed into a trade and even world language, this tricky form quickly disappeared. It was used alongside the singular and plural forms in the case when reference is made to exactly two participants. Homer was still using this form when writing the Iliad and the Odyssey, but Luke was no longer encumbered by its use when he was writing his contributions to the New Testament. He just never had to think about it when referring to more than one participant, whether he really meant just two or more than two. This is not the case for many other languages in the world, where the dual is an important grammatical distinction. If you use the dual form, you really mean just two participants, and if you use the plural form, you really mean that you have more than two participants on the stage. The trouble with the dual is that most untrained speakers are not aware of this distinction in their language – nobody ever told them, and it takes an incredible amount of abstraction to realize without prompting that a) you have three forms where other languages have two and b) what governs the use of these three forms. An unaware translator is therefore very likely to just use a plural form where really a dual form is needed, and in this way distorting the accuracy of the translation. Imagine that you must translate the following passages from the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus:

• “As they talked and discussed, Jesus himself drew near and walked along with them.” Luke 24:15
• “As they came to the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther.” Luke 24:28
  

You need to be very aware of the context to correctly decide that in verse 15 both highlighted pronouns need to be translated into the dual form for an accurate translation of the situation, as we know that indeed two disciples started out on that walk. What about verse 28? Well, the first they refers to the two disciples plus Jesus arriving at the village, so a dual form would not be correct. But the second they refers to the original two persons who started out on the journey, as Jesus did not announce his destination for this walk. So the dual form is again required.

What we can see here is that the grammar of the target language is forcing a decision on the translators that Luke as the author of the story did not face when he wrote it down for the first time in Greek. But clearly, the translators can only translate this successfully when they are aware of this forced choice in their language, and when they know how this grammatical distinction works. Experience has shown that this is normally not the case in situations where nobody has studied the language and feeds this kind of information into the translation team.

There are many other grammatical distinctions that fall into this category where choices are forced on the translators, and practically every language is expected to have some of them. Some may just lead to unnatural language or somewhat awkward expressions, whereas others may lead to serious misunderstandings and even faulty theology. 

On the other hand, it is indeed true that even untrained translators will not create ungrammatical sentences – these really go against the grain of the translators, as they break the rules of grammar in ways that cannot be ignored by them. This is the kernel of truth behind the claim that mother-tongue translators will always translate correctly into their own languages. Each sentence, taken by itself, will normally follow the rules of the grammar on the word-, phrase- and clause level. Still, there is no guarantee (and not even a high likelihood) that a grammatically unaware translator will always choose the correct grammatical categories of the target language to achieve the needed accuracy, or that the individual clauses and sentences will be combined to a readable text where the reader can track the participants, make sense out of the logical structures, or come to the right conclusions as to what is the important and new information. There are currently many glaring examples of where translation did badly go wrong because the mother-tongue translators were left alone without any kind of help to figure out what grammatical features of their language have an impact on the translation.

What is needed is a conscious awareness among the translators of the features that force choices on them in the translation process, beyond just producing grammatical sentences. Two things need to happen for that: Someone needs to study the grammar of the language to find out what these features are, and some way needs to be found to make that information available to the translation team.

In the old days of Bible translation both were accomplished by having a so-called "linguist/translator" on the translation team. This linguistically well-trained person studied the language in the early days of the project, and then in the daily translation work made the translators consciously aware of the features that mattered, so that they could apply them ever better while translating. Nowadays, though, many translation teams work completely cut off from any linguistic input, and their shortage of linguistic training also does not allow them to benefit from the usually highly technical grammar descriptions that rarely do exist about some languages (as seen on the Grammar-Watch website linked to above).

And there aren't even enough of these grammar descriptions to go round: Of the roughly 7000 languages spoken on the planet, only about 1500 can be counted as adequately described in linguistic terms, which means that most of the languages currently under translation do not have a grammar that could be consulted regarding the features that matter for translation.

So, a solid linguistic foundation is normally not a given in today's Bible translation movement. This problem becomes even bigger as many decision makers refuse to acknowledge it as a problem, discarding linguistics as a lens that would help them to connect with the reality of the human language. As the Challenger disaster has been described as a catastrophe that could have been avoided by taking reality more seriously, I think that there are many Bible translations going on that head for failure because of the willingness of the decision makers to discard necessary steps in the process in order to achieve greater speed. Linguistic foundations are the most apparent victim of this stripping-down of the process, but there are others, too. In spite of everything written above, linguistics is not the only thing that needs to be done right in Bible translation. If it is not applied well, though, the project is very likely to go wrong, so it cannot be ignored.