Bible translation is mission, and often needs missionaries

Mission Espada Tower.jpg. (2020, October 26). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved 09:18, February 23, 2025 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Mission_Espada_Tower.jpg&oldid=502944037.

This is a bit of an off topic, as it doesn't touch so much on what Bible translators do. Rather, it is a little rant on how we talk about and advertise their work. The relevant background here is that in western countries the Bible translation organizations increasingly avoid the term mission, and even more often the term missionary. Although I understand where this attitude comes from, I am convinced that it is a mistake with self-defeating consequences for the Bible-translation movement.

Bad press for missionaries

It is certainly true that the days when missionaries were unquestioned heroes are irretrievably gone. And there are good reasons for that. Looking back over the past centuries of modern mission, there are just too many situations where missionaries confused the Good News of Jesus with the good news of the Western civilization. Too often they spread the divisions of their home churches instead of Christian unity; or they willingly served the interests of the colonial powers instead of those of the people that hosted them. Rather than helping the peoples they served to adopt Jesus into their culture, they forced them to adopt the missionaries' cultures in order to accept Jesus. They split ethnic groups into two or three to avoid disagreements between the different missions, and they resisted too long when local churches asked to be given more autonomy.

So yes, there is a lot that mission and missionaries can rightly be criticized for, and for a number of decades there has certainly been no shortage of critics. Among the atheists and agnostics of the Western world there was never any deep understanding for Christian mission. But even among Christians more and more questions have been asked about the methods and even the justification for mission.

New communication strategies

To counter this bad press today's mission agencies take steps to communicate in ways that deemphasize the fact that they are just that – mission agencies. This may appear somewhat disingenuous for traditional mission agencies with a focus on evangelization, who clearly realize that they have a branding problem when they no longer call themselves what they are. But for other agencies that come with a more specialized and non-evangelistic purpose statement the temptation is greater to present themselves as something that is seen as more benign in the 21st-century context. Bible translation agencies are among them.

I guess this is more of a problem in Europe than elsewhere, but there you can look at websites of Bible translation agencies and find the word "mission" only when it comes to the agency's mission statement. Otherwise you learn that you are looking at a "Christian organization" with an international focus, partnering with churches all over the world. The staff they hope to recruit are not missionaries, but "specialists", "experts", "intercultural workers" or more of that. The hope is that a coy pretense that the agency has not for decades called itself a mission, with missionaries running all over the place, may deflect some criticism from people who don't like missionaries, for the reasons stated above and for many more.

Confusing our audience

While not accomplishing its goal of tricking the critics, this communication strategy rather results in a confused target audience. Those who want to attack mission and the work of missionaries won't be fooled by a few changed words – they know why Bible translation is being done, and by whom, and they hate it, no matter what games we play with semantics. If any effect is measurable by this new way of presenting Bible translation, it is with the people that Bible translation agencies need to convince in Europe: the very long list of supporting churches and congregations, and the young people who are willing to invest their lives into God's kingdom. They will receive the following messages:

• "Thanks for supporting our hard work for so many years! Please continue to do so, even if we make it more difficult for you to justify our work to your mission committees, as, well, we are now in the business of partnering. And yes, we partner better than anybody else!"
• "Thanks also for supporting our wonderful staff! They are ever so dedicated intercultural workers, but they'd rather not be addressed by you as your missionaries any longer. I hope you don't mind that they still depend on a share of your congregation's missionary budget!"
• "Thanks for considering to join our exciting Bible translation movement and wanting to invest your life into God's kingdom. But a missionary you cannot become with us, although this has been your life's goal since you heard all these missionary tales in Sunday school. Grow up, and join our team of dedicated Christian international experts – or ask New Tribes if you really have to be a missionary!"

The trouble is that our target audience, for the most part, has not bought in to the idea that mission and missionaries are something shameful that needs to be brushed under the carpet. They still read the "Great Commission" in their Bible, they still don't flinch when they see the map of Paul's missionary journeys, they have missionary committees, and their teenagers still vow to each other that they will become missionaries as soon as they finish high school. But when they get to the point, they are faced with a crowded market of organizations of which the ones that could be most interesting to them act as if they were anything but mission. I'd certainly be confused.

Strategically, if we want more European recruits in Bible translation, we need to let them know what we are and what they join: a mission agency as missionaries, and that needs to be part of the branding, regardless of the raised eyebrows we will see in the faces of our detractors. These eyebrows have been up all the time and won't ever go down.

Bible translation is mission

This is the point that still needs to be made – that Bible translation in its nature cannot be seen as independent from mission. It is an integral part of it. This, of course, is not the case when another committee or individual sits down to produce the 37th translation of the Bible into the English or the German language. This is rather the activity of a church that in 500 years of history has understood Bible translation to be a valuable and necessary medium for the communication of the Christian faith. This kind of Bible translation is rarely about making new believers (there are exceptions to this, when the language of the translation targets a specific subgroup of society), but about making sure that the Christian message continues to be shared in effective ways among existing believers.

But the vast majority of Bible translation projects target languages that so far have no access to the Bible, or at least no good access. Almost always in such a situation there needs to be some external involvement to get the Bible going: somewhere between the advocates for the need, the people involved in translation, the people that train these people, the organizations that administer the project, and the people that finance it, you'll find outsiders to the language community, and for these this is an act of mission. Yes, there have been translations done entirely by, from, for and with the local community, but these normally go back to very strong and self-motivated individuals, and they are very few. The many hundreds of projects that have been started over the past two decades would for the most part have never happened if there hadn't been a strong and sometimes overwhelming outside impetus. This is mission, the desire of people from a different culture, a different language, to reach another linguistic group with the Word of God in order to advance God's Kingdom.

Likewise, the people who leave behind their original habitat to go to places where they can assist with creating such a Bible translation are missionaries. The donors and funders who generously provide their financial resources for this effort are mission supporters. These things need to be said clearly, as they provide much of the framework for some of the things I will have to say in other contributions: whenever somebody is motivated to invest their time, their thinking, their energy, their money, even their lives into another people group being reached by God's Word, then they are working to fulfill the Great Commission. An organization that engages in this work is a mission organization, and it helps its standing if it communicates this clearly to the potential supporters.

If, instead, the organization succumbs to the temptation to hide its true colors, it also contributes to a world in which less is said positively about mission and missionaries. A better strategy to countering the bad press is to come up with good stories about how missionaries in the 21st century have learned many lessons from the past and genuinely contribute to a better life and flourishing communities. Professional soldiers of our times are talked about with more respect than soldiers of the 17th century. Pastors and priests of our days are not any more associated with the poor show of the clergy of the middle ages. Doctors and medical practitioners enjoy a much higher standing than their colleagues from just a few hundred years ago. So there is no reason why we couldn't fill the notion of mission and missionaries with new life in our times, in a way that at least among our home churches the people develop a new excitement for the idea. And, as the examples of soldiers and clergy show, any improved trust can quickly be destroyed by misbehavior among the new breed of specimens. It requires hard work to keep it on high levels, so that future generations won't have to complain about the failures and mistakes of mission in our times.

Rushing Bible translation means to delay it for generations to come

 

I still remember the day, maybe ten years ago, when I decided to compete in the dads' 400m race during my daughters' school's field day in Addis Ababa. 400 meters didn't sound that far, and in fact I'd heard that it is still considered a sprint distance, although the most difficult one. So I decided to run as fast as I could, throughout the race. I was sure I could keep it up for just 400 meters. From the crack of the starter pistol I was leading the field of runners – in fact, I left everybody way behind within just a few seconds. This is going well, I thought. The first doubts were coming after perhaps 100 meters, when it dawned on me that I probably wouldn't be able to maintain that pace to the end. So I reduced it a little bit. 50 meters later I reduced it even more, and after 250 meters I had settled on a very slow trot. Other runners started overtaking me, and then nearly all of them made it past me before I limped over the finish line. At least I did that! I think there must still be a photograph of me leading the field of runners near the beginning of that race, but I really don't have the heart to look at it. Okay, fine, here it is, with the first runners just about to overtake me.

This is a rookie mistake among runners: not being able to pace oneself according to the distance of the race. Had I done that for a marathon race, I surely wouldn't have made it to the finish line but collapsed somewhere in the middle of the track. You cannot approach a long-distance race like a sprint, because if you do, you won't make it.

Bible translation means going the long distance 

Throughout the 20th century it was well understood that Bible translation is a task that requires a long-term perspective, that cannot be rushed. The average duration of a New Testament translation project was somewhere near 15 years, with the fastest making it comfortably below the 10-year mark, whereas completion times of 30 or even 50 years were not unheard of. The fast outliers were usually explained by having experienced translators working already on a second project, and by things going just so without any unforeseen delays. These unforeseen delays, though, were a very frequent occurrence: illness, disagreements in the team, civil war, project leaders leaving the mission field, translators being dragged into administrative roles – there were always factors that could slow down a project, even bring it to a complete stop.

There was, however, a solid understanding that even under the best of circumstances, even with the best-trained translation team, a certain minimal completion time could hardly be bested. This was probably somewhere in the range of five years. The reason for this was that some things just had to happen during a translation, and they inevitably take time that cannot be avoided. The most notable among these was linguistic research, so that the language structures could be taken into consideration during translation, and the orthography for the language can be read and written by the members of the community. Another time-consuming activity of those days was anthropological research, indispensable for understanding which biblical concepts can be understood by the community, and which ones need special attention during translation. More time was spent on forging strong relationships with the community, with community reviews, consultant checking, consistency checking, literacy activities, and probably a few more other hoops each translation project had to jump through before it could be published. Needless to say, even the publication process took its time in those days and could easily stretch into two years until the printed Bibles were available for distribution.

But not many buy into that any more

Then came the days of Vision 2025. It started out as a very necessary quest to find ways to get more translation projects going than in previous times, but within a very short time decision makers looked beyond the original mandate and were implementing measures that would reduce the completion time of a project, once it was under way. Here they rightly identified linguistic and anthropological research, in combination with literacy activities, as the main culprits that were holding things up. Since about 2010, Bible translations only receive the necessary funding when they are conducted within the guardrails of the so-called "common framework", which was developed mostly by the funding organizations. This meant that linguistic or anthropological research was neither funded nor planned for in translation projects. The rationale behind this was that translations are nowadays done by teams of mother-tongue translators, who therefore know enough about their languages and cultures to not need any dedicated research on such matters. What I think of that idea I have written here and here.

But the funders and organizational decision makers did not stop there. With linguistics and anthropology out of the way, they still noticed annoying bottlenecks that kept translations from getting completed, and they therefore encouraged new "innovative" approaches that would do short work of them:

• Literacy is only needed if the Bible is expected to be read. Oral Bible translation would therefore eliminate the need to have expensive and time-consuming literacy campaigns, and it would make linguistic research for orthography purposes even more obsolete.
• Each biblical book needs to be checked and approved by a certified Bible-translation consultant, and there are just not enough of those to go round, given the large number of new projects and the dwindling number of consultants and consultants in training. It was therefore decided that their training should focus entirely on exegetical accuracy, leaving out the previously required linguistic competencies.
• Whereas in the old days a consultant would work with one team at a time, it was seen that working with several teams (even more than five, sometimes) at the same time would multiply a consultant's efficiency.
• This group consulting could be made even more efficient if the back translation could be produced orally on the spot, often with a further translation into a language that the flown-in consultant could understand.
• Now, the last proposed "innovation" is to cut out the tedious role of the consultant altogether and leave quality control to a local community-validation process, as the community can decide much better than an external consultant what is right in their language.

Clearly, the common denominator is to increase speed by reducing all translation steps that are seen as unnecessarily wasting time. Translators are now given a daily quota of verses to translate, with a tight planning horizon of usually not more than three years. And yes, many translations get completed in this way, by largely untrained translators, cut off from any linguistic input, with minimal quality control that does not look for the most damaging factors that would affect the usefulness of a translation.

Speeding up Bible translation is not a bad idea, in and of itself. The sooner a translation is completed, the earlier it can impact the language community, it can reach more people who otherwise die before the Bible becomes available to them. I don't think that considerations of speeding up the return of Christ really should play a role in this, but all in all it is good to remove any unnecessary slack in the translation process. But what has happened over the past 20 years results in a totally different picture. To stay in our original race metaphor: most of these translations appear to reach the finish line (some do collapse midway); but they have taken so many shortcuts on the way that they need to be disqualified, judging from the results.

Earlier this month I was at a business meeting of linguists and literacy specialists working in Bible translation, and one of the speakers, a Bible translation leader from a large nation, reported that in his country people from no less than 30 language communities had called him to ask for help, as the recently translated Bibles were completely useless (he used a stronger word here). When asked, he confirmed that these were Bibles mostly completed over the past five years. These translations were all done according to the conditions of the "common framework", using some of the "innovations" I discussed above. As they were done within the allotted timeframe granted by donors and partner organizations, these were certainly very efficient projects, but as they resulted in New Testaments that apparently nobody can read or understand, they are in no way apt to be called effective. They sadly will have zero impact on their language communities.

What will happen with these languages now? I fear that for a long time nothing will happen. It is good that the lack of quality of the translations is recognized by the speakers of the languages, which is often not the case. But these languages now have a checkmark as "translation done" in the relevant databases, because everyone can point to the books or audio files that are now available (if not in vigorous circulation). As I stated in another blog entry, there are several reasons why there will most likely be no revision or re-translation for these languages for generations to come. To the reasons stated there we need to add the sunk-cost fallacy: acknowledging that these translations won't serve their language communities would require the donors and organizations to drastically change their strategy and previous assumptions. It is more likely that the source of the problem is looked for among local factors or individual failings, but not in the systemic inadequacy of the whole translation approach. Too much was invested into this over the past decades that it could quickly be turned around and rectified using a different approach.

Either way, it is most likely that language communities with unreadable or incomprehensible translations will have to wait for a very long time until they will be given another shot at this, if ever. And since these translations are not going to be read by their communities, for all practical purposes we need to treat these communities as being unreached by the Bible. They just don't have it, despite the beautiful gold-cut book collecting dust in so many cardboard boxes, or on shelves at best. The communities have been served as well as if no translation had ever been started in their language. In fact, they have been served worse, as they are now saddled with a very strong reason against them getting a useful translation in any reasonable time frame.

I fear that there will be a great number of such translations in the near future: rushed into existence with the genuine intention that this would end Bible poverty for the communities, but they are now heavy impediments that stand in the way of well-translated Bibles reaching these communities anytime soon. As long as the global Bible translation movement continues on this path of cranking out translations with a premium on speed, it will accomplish the opposite of its stated goal: more and more languages will be cut off from the Bible for generations to come.

Bible translation requires focus

  

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As Bible translation is a technical task that should only be undertaken by a by a well-trained work force, it stands to reason that its success can only be assured when it is entrusted to a specialized agency, or to a specialized department within a more general agency. This is like when we need medical help for our teeth or for our eyes. We'd rather not go to a general practitioner for this, but make an appointment with a certified dentist (or eye doctor, respectively) from the outset. Certainly we would not go to a veterinary who puts a sign "also fix human teeth" in his window, or to a department store. There may be a hospital with a specialized dentistry unit, and that would also qualify to meet our needs. We do this because we know that healing teeth is complicated and difficult enough that only credible specialists will do.

This trust in specialists has a flip side. Would we happily approach a certified dentist when the following information is known to us? This dentist only occasionally works on human teeth; instead, most of his time he spends between his golf course, his philanthropic club and the office of a political party, where he serves as the district secretary. Most of the income of his clinic is generated by its being the scenery of toothpaste advertisements, and by a lot of profitable cosmetic surgery done by the employees of the dentist. We would justifiably conclude that the dentist has become a little bit too distracted by other things to still be reliably good as a dentist.

The same may happen to organizations doing Bible translation. If an organization was founded for this very purpose, then it needs to take great care that it doesn't lose its focus on this task. It can happen in a number of ways.

Expansion pressures

Expansion pressures make themselves felt when an agency and its people get confused by its so-called "vision statement" and treat it like its mission. This happens to the best of them, as it is really difficult to keep these concepts straight in organizational development. Since the 1990s companies and non-profit organizations have been recommended to develop strong statements that guide their strategic thinking. The first of such statements, the mission statement, is quite straightforward in its scope, and in what it provides for the organization – it defines its purpose in terms of what an organization does, and who for. The second statement, the vision statement, is less focused on the present, but more on the future, a desired future to which the work of the organization contributes. Vision statement crafters for Bible translation organizations have been rather bold in the past decades, painting a picture of a glorious future which sees nothing less than everyone (and their brother) flourishing in practically every aspect of their lives.

There is nothing wrong with that, as long as everybody remembers that the vision statement is pronounced to provide a long-term context for the work defined in the mission statement, a lasting impact to which the mission offers a contribution. But vision and mission statements rarely come with an instruction manual, and when you have a very broadly painted vision statement, more and more decision makers over time mistake it for the organization's real purpose and start working towards this future not just within the guardrails of the mission statement, but from all possible other angles that would need to be addressed if that future is ever going to materialize.

Now, if the vision statement envisions "flourishing communities" in the future, decision makers may then be tempted to think that communities cannot possibly be flourishing if material poverty is not addressed, if environmental degradation is not taken care of, if harmful practices are not pushed back, if corrupt structures are not broken up, if gender equality is not achieved, if medical care is not dramatically improved. Then they look at what the organization does, and to their great alarm they notice that it does not do anything in particular to contribute to such a future except Bible translation! At this stage, new ideas are being developed to close this apparent gap in reaching the vision, and if they indeed get implemented, this organization has probably lost some focus and experiences mission drift.

I now quickly need to add that these decision makers are absolutely right in their analysis that the envisioned future of a bold and broad vision statement will indeed stay out of reach if nobody is going to address all these problems. But they are mistaken in the idea that it is the Bible translation organization's job to do this. This job is rather defined in the mission statement (if this is indeed more than just a vaguely worded free-for-all), and the organization should stick to this narrow contribution to not lose its focus.

Pressured by money

Since they exist, Bible translation organizations struggle to get their work funded, a work that usually comes at considerable financial cost. The traditional funding models, centered around the partnership development work of the individual missionaries, were quite reliable over time, but they left little margin for extraordinary expenses, such as the funding needed to run a literacy campaign. This is where project funding came in: the organizations marketed such extra expenses as attractive donation opportunities for wealthy or institutional donors, and these thankfully closed many gaps by giving generously. But they also let their preferences be known as to what kind of project they would really be excited about. Over time the organizations learned what activity was sure to attract funds, and projects were therefore packaged in ways that they looked more like such opportunities.

In combination with the mission drift caused by expansion pressures, this money-driven incentive led to more and more projects that had little to do with the original core business of Bible translation, as some of the additional activities were indeed hitting a nerve with the public and with the donors. Once larger amounts of money and resources are thrown at an organization to do things that are not reeeaaallly part of the organization's portfolio, it is very difficult for the organizational decision makers to step in and call a halt to such proceedings. Most of the stakeholders around such a scenario would not understand why something should not be done if everybody loves it, everybody understands its importance, and money is given freely to get it done.

As an example, I'd like to mention here a project that is well-known in translation circles: Trauma Healing (TH). This came up as a timely response to genuine needs that arose in Bible translation projects for communities that were ravaged by severe conflicts marked by immense physical and psychological trauma. TH was a way to prepare translation teams to work in such environments, and without such intervention most likely the translation projects would have had no basis to succeed. These TH interventions were truly successful, and they contributed to the language development goals of the communities, as they added to the body of literature available in the language. All in all, this contributed fully to the organizational Bible translation goals, and it was a fine example for how a translation project could contribute to the flourishing of a community.

This success, though, created a new branch of work in Bible translation organizations where this TH concept was applied to more and more situations, some in local languages, and more in languages of wider communication. As the need to do so was apparent in many countries, it was not difficult to attract funding, which in turn funneled more personnel and resources into Trauma Healing. Over the past decade or so, this has become a major leg to stand on for some organizations. In a country I know well, a large number of staff are now engaged in this, and most of the work is happening in the major languages of the country. Since the work is so popular among the national churches, so necessary for intrinsic reasons, and so well-funded, nobody ever stops and thinks whether this is something that a Bible translation organization should do.

So what? What is wrong with this?

Why indeed should a Bible translation not do something that everybody wants it to do and that is amply resourced? The reason has to do with focus, the theme of this entry.

If a Bible translation organization sticks to its stated purpose (or mission), it will form a team of specialists who are trained to fulfill this mission – quality Bible translations. They will have a range of skills and the required knowledge to succeed in this. Bible translation is in itself already a holistic endeavor, as it needs progress on a number of fronts: Bible translation as such, linguistics, anthropological understanding, literacy, education, training, local resourcing. A number of various expert roles are therefore required, and they need to be kept at their task to make the organization succeed in their mission.

If a new activity is taken on, as happened in the case of TH, the initial idea is usually developed by people of the original organizational skill-pool, and it fits into the original purpose of the organization. But once it takes on its own life, two things will happen: First, the new organizational direction will draw experts from the original task set to the new set, so that they can no longer contribute to the core mission. And second, further staff are required to professionalize the new activity, as it is often seen that the originally available skill set is not sufficient to become really good at doing the new thing. The more successful the new activity is, the more it will expand the organization into a direction that is not its core business.

If an organization grows around its fringes and shrinks in the core, mission drift is almost inevitable. There will be a growing number of people who don't understand the processes and best practices of the core business. Resource administrators of the organization will find themselves attracted to the new activities, as they bring in a large portion of the available funds and indeed may even account for a large part of the administration's growth over the years. Future administrators and decision makers will grow out of the new activities, and organizational decision making will largely center around making the new activities more successful, while ever less energy is expended on the core business. In the end the new-activity tail is wagging the dog, and I think we see a lot of this in the current situation.

The flipside to all these considerations is that there are usually organizations, often even local churches, who in the long run would be much better placed to pursue the activities that encroach on the portfolio of Bible translation organizations. When it comes to promoting existing scripture translations, in the traditional division of labor this was left to local churches or other organizations such as the Scripture Union. They attract the right kind of specialists that are needed to succeed in this line of work, and they are usually quite different people from those that are needed for successful Bible translation. Translation organizations should therefore become much more rigorous in asking what kind of scripture engagement activity is indeed necessary to be done in and around the translation project, and which activity should be left for the church or specialized partners. Strategic abandonment is an organizational necessity to keep the focus on the main priority.

This is not just a matter of not stepping on other organizations' or churches' toes, but a matter of professional ethics. If my organization does not have the best skillset and knowledge to do a certain activity, it may turn out to do more harm than good. I certainly observe this when orthographies are developed by well-meaning but untrained people from organizations who don't usually do this complex task – such orthographies often come with severe, but entirely avoidable problems. This should teach me to not dabble in other professional areas for which I am not trained myself and where I don't understand all the complexities.

So far I have written mostly about scripture-engagement type activities that may distract from good focus in Bible translation, but it would not be fair to name only those. Also, linguistic activities have played their part, for example when the language-endangerment movement stirred up the linguistic world and many Bible translators felt that they would have to contribute to the fight against language death by channeling resources and time into language documentation efforts for languages that nobody ever planned a translation for. In other situations, Bible translators got side-tracked by setting up grain banks, by building irrigation dams, by developing Sunday-school curricula, or by running local clinics.

Of course, there is a time when an organization may realize that its original goals are either already reached or no longer attainable. Instead of shutting down, the organization may then wish to redefine its purpose or mission, coming up with new things to do – this is entirely legitimate. But has the worldwide Bible translation movement already reached such a point or has come anywhere near it? Has the time come to transfer as organizations from Bible translation to scripture engagement? 

Remember that the founder of the modern Bible translation movement, Cameron Townsend, left the scripture engagement work in Central America he was assigned to because he realized that too many people in the world could not benefit from scripture unless it was translated into their languages. Have we now, a hundred years later, reached a situation where this is no longer true? Looking at what is going on right now, I conclude that countless languages still do not have a Bible translation. Many of the translations recently finished or currently under way will have to be redone because of quality issues. The remaining languages without a Bible are also often those with the lowest education levels in their communities, and therefore with the highest need for intensive training of translators. In many countries the capacity of the national consultant corps is not anywhere near the point where things can just be handed over to the local churches. Linguistic input is currently at an all-time low in modern Bible translation history, and the capacity for it is dwindling.

There is therefore no indication that this is the right time for the Bible translation movement to diversify its focus into other activities that take away resources, people and funds from Bible translation. Organizations that place all their focus and energy on quality Bible translation are as much needed as they were in Cam Townsend's time. Current translation organizations need to realize and accept that they are indispensable for the success of the task, and that they cannot afford to lose focus. Where they have done so already, they need to return to their original center of gravity and redouble their effort on what is needed most, now and in the foreseeable future.