Category Archives: Christianity

The day tribal ended

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Tomorrow, people around the world will celebrate a very unusual happening on a Jewish festival some 2000 years ago. Read the account here.

But let’s back up a bit. One can read the Old Testament as the story of a tribal religion. By “tribal” I mean proprietary – belonging to a specific group of people. The religion of the descendants of Abraham came to them in their language, it is full of their stories about their God.

There are many tribal religions which also belong to people of a common ancestry, who share the same customs and usually the same language. Most tribal religions respect other peoples who have their own gods and religious practices.

A careful reading of the Old Testament shows that God had universal ambitions when he choose to start with Abraham and his descendants. Which brings us to the first festival of Pentecost after Jesus was crucified. Something happened there which shook to the core the idea that Jesus had come to fulfill the aspirations of only a limited group of people – everyone started hearing about the glory of God proclaimed in their own language. Tribal religions are almost always locked up in one language. Here was something different.

From that day, Christianity has been a religion which is not tied to one culture or one language. Instead, it permeated Roman society and the Greek language, breaking free from any tribal identity. Other events, such as those Peter experienced with Cornelius came along to confirm and seal the breakout. The Apostle Paul wrote against those who wanted to tie Christianity to tribal roots. Occasionally some try again to make Christianity a tribal religion – attempting to tie it to a particular language, nation and/or customs. But it never lasts.

There are two ways to be a universal religion. One is to assimilate everyone into your tribe. In this method, everyone will eventually have the same customs, perhaps speak the same language, have the same religious practices, and believe the same religious teachings. The other is the path God has taken Christianity where the person at the heart of the religion, Jesus, comes into languages and cultures and they develop an allegiance to Him while continuing to speak their languages and practice their culture – building houses as they did, singing the same kind of music they always did, being proud of their people’s history and achievements, and so on. Christianity does not seek to assimilate all cultures, even if some of its proponents sometimes mistakenly try to do that. Christianity translates itself into the languages and cultural forms of people.

Christianity does not erase culture, but weaves itself into the culture to create a rich tapestry – Rev. Prof. J D Ekem

If God had hired the most successful advertising agency to put on an event to illustrate that faith him is not a tribal thing, that agency could not have come up with a more convincing and significant event than the one described in Acts chapter 2. All those people, who had been assimilated into Judaism and had come to the center of that faith, Jerusalem, to worship each heard in their own languages – languages hitherto reserved for their tribal religions. Amazing.

If you liked this, you might also like Worse than you thought, Linguistic diversity or Weak things.

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Words

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You might think that every word has a meaning. But open a dictionary and you will see that most words have several meanings and some have such a wide range of meanings that one might wonder how they can be useful at all.

I was reminded about this by an exchange among friends on Facebook. (edited a bit to remove personal details)

Status update by friend 1: Home after a wonderful weekend. Attended a wedding on Saturday and visited with old friends.
Comment #1: didn’t know we were considered old
Comment #2: ancient

I am sure that these comments were made in good fun. But the exchange does show two of the meanings of “old”. The “old” friends are not ancient, but rather people who have been friends for a long time, or perhaps friends which one had not seen for a long time.

This past football season, I  noticed that football announcers say of a good receiver that he has “soft hands”. This means that the receiver catches the ball very well. I suppose that the ball would bounce off something “hard” but “stick” to something soft. This is quite a different meaning than when an advertisement says that a certain cream or soap will give a woman soft hands.

We use context to sort out which meaning of a word or phrase is intended. There is no confusion, it is clear when the “soft hands” means one thing and when it means the other. After all, football announcers would not be commenting on the luxurious qualities of the skin on the hands of a macho receiver!

The fact that every word has a range of meaning must be taken into account in a good translation. In one sense, Bible translation is not the same as interpretation. When Revelation says “Then I saw a black horse, and its rider had a balance scale in one hand”, the translator should just translate. It is then up to the preachers and theologians to interpret the meaning of the black horse and the scale. But in another sense, one cannot translate even one word or phrase without interpreting it. Here is an example from Psalm 24 where “soft hands” are not mentioned, but “clean hands” are:

“Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart… He will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God his Savior.”

In some cultures, dirty hands indicate a hard worker. To say that some one has clean hands is to say that they are lazy. (Source: From the Wycliffe UK magazine, Words for Life, November 2012)

In such a case, it would be foolish to translate the words “clean hands” literally. It would mean that God approves lazy people. So the words “clean hands” (or rather the Hebrew words so translated into English) have to be interpreted, and then the translators finds words in the other language that match that interpretation. Something like “He whose hands are not soiled with evil deeds” might work, but the exact solution will vary from language to language.

Languages are amongst the richest and most complex systems humankind has ever produced.

Antoine Lefeuvre

If you liked this, you might also like New meanings, Outdooring, or Eternal life.

Uncle Cam

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Today (April 23) in 1982, William Cameron Townsend passed into eternity, leaving a huge temporal legacy. Not money, mind you. Rather, the man the members of Wycliffe Bible translators affectionately called Uncle Cam, left behind a translation movement which has continued to grow after his death.

William Cameron Townsend

William Cameron Townsend

I use the word “movement” on purpose. Uncle Cam did found an organization – Wycliffe Bible Translators – and for that he is best known. Wycliffe Bible Translators has spread beyond the USA. There are now hundreds of organizations worldwide affiliated with Wycliffe including the one I with with, the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation. Uncle Cam did much more than found a successful Christian organization! What he started has morphed into a worldwide movement to translate the Bible into every language.

Actually, I don’t think it was Uncle Cam’s doing at all. Let me explain.

The movement to translate the Bible into all languages has its ideological roots in the reformation. “Scriptures only” was the cry of the reformers, meaning that they believed that the final authority for faith was in the Bible, not in the church. They also believed that any person could rightly interpret the Bible without the guidance of the church. They put feet on those belief by translating the Bible into the languages right where they were – English, German, French, and so on even when people thought they were crazy to abandon the world language of the time – Latin. The founding of the Bible Societies in the 1800s was another outworking of those same beliefs.

When missionaries with these beliefs spread across the world, they to acted in a manner consistent with them and they too translated the Bible into the languages where they went, native North American languages in the US and Canada, the languages of India, and I could go on and on.

Uncle Cam came from this heritage. As a young man, to put his beliefs into practice he went to Guatemala to sell Bibles in Spanish, the official language of that country. There he discovered a fact he did not know – many people in Guatemala spoke languages other than Spanish. They were not interested in a Bible in a language they did not know. Uncle Cam’s beliefs kicked in. He translated the Bible into one of the languages of Guatemala. He also started gathering information about how many languages did not have the Bible. He thought it was about 500.

Knowing that he could not do that alone, he went back to the USA and started recruiting young people. The rest, as they say, is history, except that the history is still being written. It is hard to know, but there are tens of thousands of across the world involved in translating the Bible into a language for the first time. There are millions of people supporting them in prayer, giving, advocacy and going short term. Those people come from all over. Yes, there are Americans, Canadians, Germans and other Westerners. But there are also people from Ghana, Korea, India, Indonesia, Russia, Slovakia, Mexico, Brazil and yes, even Guatemala and many others. Wycliffe is now a broad-based, international alliance.

This cannot possibly be the doing of one man.

William Cameron Townsend

William Cameron Townsend

God planted the seeds in the form of a simple idea – the Bible is for everyone in their own language. He nurtured that idea. It grew into the Bible Societies. Then as Uncle Cam made known that there were still thousands of unique languages without the Bible, others who embraced that simple idea joined him. God fanned a spark in individual hearts and turned it into a huge fire that spread out of control across the world.

The lesson of Uncle Cam’s life is simple and the conclusion I draw from it is not really mine. He engaged in something God was doing and which fit the core tenants of Christian faith. I have sometimes dealt with people who were skeptical that some group, say Africans, had what it took to be part of the movement. That skepticism goes nowhere because God is pushing the other direction. As we remember Uncle Cam today, the question for each of us is whether our passions fit the core tenants of our faith and align with what God is doing in the world. Anything else cannot have lasting impact.

If you liked this, you might also like Nida, The guy who obliterated geography, or Ulifas.

Taamba

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Translation of the proper nouns in the Bible is an issue that is rarely controversial and not very exciting. But, it is important. Studies show that proper nouns are the biggest hindrance to reading the Bible fluently. You don’t need a fancy study to reach that conclusion. Just hand a Bible, any translation, to someone and ask them to read out loud a passage full of names of people or places, especially the Old Testament. Almost everyone will stumble while reading the names.

So, one of the easiest ways to increase the readability of a translation of the Bible is to put a little work into the translation or transliteration of proper nouns. It is too late for English. The English spelling of names in the Bible has been set for a long time We are just going to have to keep stumbling over those strange names. But, we can make a bit of a difference when translating the Bible into a language for the first time.

So, one of the mundane but important tasks in translating the Bible for the first time into a language is to develop an approach toward proper names that will cause readers the fewest problems. A good Bible translator uses the science of linguistics to develop a solid approach which is both accurate and respects the structure of the language.

Consider proper nouns used to describe people from a specific place. English has a complicated system. Depending on the place, English adds “ers” or “ians”, as in New Yorkers and Oregonians. But how to choose? A person from the town of Kumasi in Ghana would be what? A Kumasian? A Kumasier? Then there are the irregular forms. People from Greece are Greeks, those from Japan are Japanese, and those from Bangladesh are Bangladeshis.

Dayle and I started our career in Bible translation learning the Cerma languages in southwest Burkina Faso. In comparison to English, Cerma is a model of predictability. If the name of the place ends in a consonant, add a vowel and then “taamba”, otherwise, just add “taamba”. Presto, the name for the people who live in that place. In Cerma, Oregonians are Oregonitaamba.

Cerma NT TOCA number of books of the New Testament are named after the people to whom they were first written. For example, the book written to the people in the city of Colossae is called Colossians, the one to the residents of the city of Philippi, is called Philippians. These names follow the English practice of adding “ians”. So how did the translators name these books in Cerma? Simple, they just added “taamba”.

Just take a look at the table of contents for the New Testament in the Cerma language. You can see that many of the books that would end in “ians” in English end in “taamba” in Cerma.

Not only does using taamba make it easy to read, but without being taught, even an uneducated Cerma reader will know that Galasitaamba means the people who live in a place called Galasi. A little effort put into studying the language and apply that to translation produces a translation where proper nouns are easier read and understand.

If you liked this, you might also like Translating unknown terms, Boring stuff or Not just anyone can translate.

A New Key

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Dr. Solomon Sule-Saa presenting a summary of his research to September conference

Dr. Solomon Sule-Saa presenting a summary of his research to September conference

I have written before about Solomon Sule-Saa, a Ghanaian who has done extensive research on the impact of translating the Bible into the Konkomba and Bimoba languages of northern Ghana. In a summary of his research presented to a conference in September, he said of the Konkomba and Bimoba peoples:

“The Bible now provides the key to understand the world”

I have heard my share of sermons on Romans 12:2

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind”

But I do not think that I have heard a better description of one way to put that verse into practice – that the Bible should be the key through which I interpret the whole world.

Translating the Bible into new languages is often billed as effective evangelism, and it is. But it is much more than that. Beyond bringing people to Christ, these translations are transforming individuals and communities through renewing people’s minds.

Dr. Sule-Saa's doctoral thesis which explored the impact of the translation of the Bible in two languages of northern Ghana

Dr. Sule-Saa’s doctoral thesis which explored the impact of the translation of the Bible in two languages of northern Ghana

During an ethnic conflict which was so serious the Ghana army had to intervene, the Bimoba lost confidence in the neutrality and good will of the Ghana government. They saw no way forward but to continue fight for their rights. In a war council, several leaders quoted from the translated Bible, arguing that that Jesus way is the way of reconciliation. So, abandoning their own wisdom they agreed to engage in peace talks moderated by the government they no longer trusted. It worked. They got what they were seeking through negotiation. Now that is faith – following the teachings of the Bible when your life and your livelihoods are at stake. This story shows that the Bible in these languages is doing more than influencing the decisions of individuals. It is also affecting the decisions made by the chiefs for the whole group. Now that is being transformed.

If you liked this, you might also like Tome, Patois, or Feeling the Gospel in our bones.

Bimoba traditional dance

Bimoba traditional dance

Undeserved

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John Daboney

John Daboney

This is John Daboney, a Ghanaian from the Nawuri language. He is holding his copy of the Nawuri New Testament at its dedication on November 23.

John was the main reviewer for the translation of the New Testament into the Nawuri language. As a  reviewer he was an unpaid volunteer and John is retired. In Ghana, that means that he has a very modest income. He lost his wife a year ago. She had a job that brought in most of their income. But rather than go out and find work or do some farming, John kept devoting all his time to review the Nawuri translation. He put in thousands of volunteer hours pouring over each verse to check that it was clearly and accurately translated. In April 2012, I stopped briefly in Kpandai, where the translation office is located. The translators told me that John’s suggestions were many and invaluable. He saw things that were not clear and had a knack for knowing how to say things more clearly and accurately. Some people just have a gift for their language. They are invaluable in the translation process.

Nawuri translation team including volunteers

Nawuri translation team including volunteers

John has a problem with his eyes for which he underwent an operation two years ago. He needed more treatment but he postponed it because of time and lack of money. For him, the translation was higher priority.

Missionaries who travel to difficult places get recognized. Books are written about some of them. But across the world and across the centuries, tens of thousands of local people play crucial roles in the missionary endeavor. They contribute with little or no pay. Sometimes, they are persecuted. I met another Ghanaian whose father was the first pastor from one of the language communities in northern Ghana. His childhood memories include that most people were against is father, considering him a traitor for leaving the traditional religion. The believed that he endangered everyone because the spirits and deities would certainly retaliate for being abandoned and everyone would suffer. But his father showed immense faith and perseverance. Now Christianity is widely accepted.

No missionary biography will be written about that pastor nor about John Daboney. When I see their contribution I think of these verses in Hebrews:

Many of these people were tortured, but they refused to be released. They were sure that they would get a better reward when the dead are raised to life. Others were made fun of and beaten with whips, and some were chained in jail. Still others were stoned to death or sawed in two or killed with swords. Some had nothing but sheep skins or goat skins to wear. They were poor, mistreated, and tortured. The world did not deserve these good people, who had to wander in deserts and on mountains and had to live in caves and holes in the ground. (Heb 11: 35-38, CEV, emphasis mine)

At the dedication of the Nawuri New Testament in November

At the dedication of the Nawuri New Testament in November

John Daboney and many others like him really are better than the world deserves, better even than we missionaries deserve. In mid February, John passed away suddenly; barely three months after the dedication of the translation to which he was so dedicated. In Ghana and in many other places more like him continue to work on the translations in their languages. Pray that God would meet their needs and that He would encourage them. But most of all, thank him for calling them and filling them with unselfish faith.

If you liked this, you might also like Counted, Not just anyone can translate, or Why nationals.

Counting English Translations

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CoverBradford B. Taliaferro has published an Encyclopedia of English Language Bible Versions. According to Amazon:

This encyclopedia is the first book to identify, explain and categorize more than 1,400 versions of the English Bible!

Taliaferro’s encyclopedia boasts

  • 407 different Bibles
  • 53 Old Testaments
  • 407 New Testaments
  • more than 180 variants of the Authorized Version
  • 50 unfinished Bible versions
  • internet versions along with print versions
  • and more

There are so many versions that the author had to create “difference tables” to help differentiate between versions which are quite similar. The index includes version titles, nicknames, abbreviations, translators, dates, source texts, and more.

Alpha BibleOn his blog, the author has noted some translations did not make their way into the encyclopedia, including the new Alpha Bible, a variant of the King James Bible with the books in alphabetical order.

All this in English. Versions in other language do not find their way into Taliaferro’s massive work. It takes 553 pages to contain all the information. Not surprisingly, 692,573 books on Amazon.com sell better than this Encyclopedia. On the other hand, some of the Bible versions sell very well indeed.

So if you were bewildered by the many versions of the Bible in English, be glad you did not know the half of it – or even one tenth!

I have not begrudged that we have many translations in English. But it is a bit embarrassing that we have so many that a man can spend a good part of his life just cataloging them. It would be nice if the remaining 1900+ languages without the Bible got translations before we add enough new versions in English that Mr. Taliaferro feels the need to update his encyclopedia.

If you liked this, you might like this video entitled “Just the right Bible”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_GxJmFgIo

Grassroots

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Man from northern Ghana

Man from northern Ghana

In the vast majority of cases, languages without the Bible also do not have an alphabet. They have never been written. There are no dictionaries and no grammars. This situation is typically seen as an obstacle which requires some specialized linguistics work before getting to the real work of Bible translation. But often, for the people who speak the language, it is much more than a preliminary step.

They are very often very interested in having their language written. They are proud when their “second class” language is raised to the status of other languages by having an alphabet, a dictionary and written documents. For this reason, Bible translators often have very good relationships with traditional community leaders even when the community is apathetic toward or even opposed to the Gospel message. This leads to some odd juxtapositions. Some Bible translators have found that they were treated like royal guests at the court of the Paramount chief. Clerics of other religions many show up to support for Bible translation. One Bible translator noticed that young men would memorize their holy book and recite it publicly. So he proposed to the religious leaders that the same be done for the newly translated Gospel of Mark. They agreed! Young men memorized the book and recited it publicly with their religious leaders watching and approving.  In Mozambique, a cleric of another religion offered to promote Bible study because of a booklet describing the grammar in his language. You can read the full story here.

GILLBT Director (right) with a traditional chief in Ghana

GILLBT Director (right) with a traditional chief in Ghana

People may be opposed to the Gospel message when, in fact, they are opposed to a caricature of it based on lack of knowledge or communication in a language they did not fully understand. In some places in northern Ghana, people first believed that Christianity was for people from the southern parts of Ghana, but not for them. Then they sometimes believed that Christianity was for the educated only, not for them. But they were enthusiastic to see their language developed. Along the way, they got a new, more complete, understanding of Christianity.

In the end, developing an alphabet for an unwritten language is very often much more than a technical task. It is a way into the heart of the community. It gives the translator credibility with a community, even a resistant community, in ways that very few actions can. When missionaries and their supporters see linguistics research as nothing more than a hurdle to get over before starting the “real” task” of translation, they may be missing a prime opportunity for the Gospel, and a way to show God’s love and care.

Ulfilas

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This post is about a man you probably never heard of who did something unheard of.

Ulfilas evangelizing the Goths

Ulfilas evangelizing the Goths

Ulfilas lived some 1600 plus years ago; from about AD 330 to 380. He left the comfort of his life as a Roman citizen to evangelize the Goths – an east Germanic tribe.

The Goths spoke their own language, of course. So like many missionaries Ulfilas learned it to communicate with them. There is nothing unusual about that. Ulfilas also wanted to translate the Bible into the language of the Goths, but there was a problem. The Goth language had never been written. It did not have an alphabet. So he took on the extraordinarily difficult intellectual challenge of writing down a language which had never been written. The thing is, he succeeded, thus becoming the first person to accomplish that for a language not his own. His alphabet captured accurately the sounds of spoken Goth. It has 27 letters borrowed from the Greek and Roman alphabets. Ulfilas did this in about 360 AD without the benefit of studying linguistics which was not invented until almost 1300 years later! People who attempt this task today study linguistics first and are supported by a whole body of literature that explains all the ins and outs as well as experts they can consult not to mention talking to other people who have done it. Dayle and I had all that support when we proposed an alphabet for the Cerma language in Burkina Faso.

Wulfila_bibel-edited

A page from Ulfilas’ translation into Goth

Ulfilas was way before his time. It was not until the 1700s that writing down unwritten languages became a somewhat common missionary endeavor. In the 19th and 20ths centuries it boomed. Today, more languages have been written for the first time through the work of missionary Bible translators than any other way! This fact shows the fallacy in the claim that missionaries destroy culture. Much more has been done to preserve and develop the world’s minority languages by missionaries than by anthropologists.

Also, only a relatively small number of people, a few thousand perhaps, will ever go down in history as giving an unwritten language an alphabet. Time is running out for anyone wanting to follow in the steps of Ulfilas.

If you liked this, you might also like Counted, Patois, or What Alphabet.

500 2000 3000 then 2000 again

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Townsend-2000-Composite

There are perhaps as many as 500 languages in the world. At least that’s what Wycliffe’s founder William Cameron Townsend thought when he started the organization in the 1930s. The number increased to 1,000. Then by the time I joined in the 1970s, it was over 2000. By then, Wycliffe had published a book entitled Two Thousand Tongues to Go.

Gradually, the number kept increasing. Why? Well, we kept discovering more languages. In the 1990s that stopped. Oh, we still might find a new language here or there, but nothing like the thousands being discovered in the middle of the 20th century. One of the little-heralded scientific achievements of that period was the cataloging of all the languages of the world, largely achieved by people interested in translating the Bible into more languages.

As the number of known languages increased – eventually to over 6,900 – so did the number without a translation of the Bible, reaching 3,000 in the 1990s – a far cry from the estimated 500 of only 60 years earlier.

But even as the number of languages stabilized around 6,900, the number still needing a translation was only decreasing by 25 per year – translation work was starting in about 25 languages every year. Imagine trying to save $3,000 by adding $25 to a cookie jar once a year. Even stalwart supporters of translating the Bible into all languages wondered if it was doable or worthwhile.

Enter John Watters. He had an idea called Vision 2025 which called for starting translation in all languages by 2025. A nice motivational goal, I thought, even if it can’t be done.

Well, Wycliffe just released the latest statistics. You can see them here. The number of languages without the Bible has dropped to less than 2,000 for the first time since we knew how many languages there are! Better, the rate of starting translation in more languages has increased way beyond 25 per year. The current pace has translation in the last language starting in the 2030s. Of course, that requires that giving, going and praying continue at the same pace. On the other hand, if God’s people were to pick up the pace a bit, 2025 is very possible.

This means that my children will see the last translation started and probably finished! Time is running out to be part of this historic moment. Don’t show up at the end of the world, see how proud our God is of those he asked to be involved and regret that you didn’t invest some prayer, money or time in this great thing God is doing.