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.