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.