Making the Narrative Flow

When working on narrative sections of the Bible, such as bits of Genesis, the Synoptic gospels, and so on, it is often good to keep certain key terms and phrases concordant, by which I mean we translate them the same way each time. Some translators will want to vary nouns such as 'blessing' and 'faithful love', adjectives such as 'good' and 'merciful', and phrases such as 'walk with God' and 'the Word of the LORD' each time they use them, much as a poet would. Though this may be seen as good style from a literary point of view, it doesn't help the narrative hang together in the way the author or narrator originally designed it - what we call 'cohesion'. I prefer to talk about narrators rather than authors, as we cannot get in the mind of the author, but we can see from the text what the narrator was trying to achieve. In the 1980s and 1990s various writers (Alter, Berlin, Licht, Sternberg, Turner) brought out books teaching what has come to be known as the New Literary Criticism, or Narrative Approaches to the Bible. They study scenes, characters, points of view (narrator's, a character's), and key terms. Although they wrote mainly on the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible as some of them would call it, their approaches can equally be applied to narrative portions of the NT. If we keep terms concordant, we allow the reader to see links between narratives, and draw conclusions that are vital to understanding the Bible. Meaning-based translation can militate against such concordance (or consistency, if there is some kind of system), and variance may at times be necessary due to the difference in semantic range of words, but we need to keep as much consistency as possible, I would argue, and not be slap-dash or careless in our work.

Here are a couple of books to read on the subject:

Alter, Robert
The Art of Biblical Narrative
Basic Books, USA, 1981

Sternberg, Meir
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative
Indiana University Press, Bloomington IL. 1985

Adele Berlin
Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative.
Eisenbrauns; Reprint edition (1 Dec 1994)

In addition, Alter has done translations of the Pentateuch, Samuel, and Psalms. The translations themselves are not by any means meaning-based, but the footnotes are wonderfully helpful!

And to finish, here's a quote:

'Gen. 22, Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac, is an example of a brilliant narrative. ‘Narrative, whatever its medium, holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers’ (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction).'
http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t94/e1308 accessed 16/09/2013

Why we Work in Partnership with Others

We have always worked in partnership with other organisations, not least to see Bibles printed and distributed, a role we have often left to the Bible Societies. It used to be that we were one of the main organisations working in minority languages, and considered ourselves the experts - hence the Ethnologue - an on line and print resource for those who want to find out about people groups and which language they speak: www.ethnologue.com.

In the real world ministry is sometimes messy. No I'm not talking about messy church, I'm talking about messy ministry - where people dive in and do what seems to be best, then look for help once they realise they are in over their heads. This often happens in Bible translation. A church-planting team will be working in an area like the one in the photo above, and realise they don't have a Bible for the people they are trying to reach, so they start working on one! Pretty soon they realise they need some training and consultant input, and this is the point where they often approach us. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a large mission organisation focused on a particular country or area realises the need for a new translation into the modern spoken language. The 19th-century translation seems out of date or too literal to be of use in evangelism - it isn't well understood. So they find a believer who is qualified to translate, but again they need someone in the Bible translation world to visit and work with this translator, to advise, encourage, and help them with exegesis (working out the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek the Bible was written in). This is where we can help. We have realised it is better to work in partnership to see the goal of scriptures begun in every language that needs it by the year 2025 (Vision 2025 http://wycliffe.org.uk//wycliffe/about/vision-2025.html). If we tried to work on our own the work would take much longer, and though it might be of good quality, there is a danger it won't be well-used. Working with church planting and other mission organisations ensures that message gets out there and is read, or heard, or watched on TV, as appropriate. Working like this may be messy, but it leads to Kingdom growth. Please pray for ongoing good relationships!
 

Are We Excluding People? (A thought on partnership).

When we are working with a particular ethnic group or socio-ethnic group, how many others should we include as partners? Often we tend to include:

• Church leaders from that particular socio-ethnic group
• Mission leaders from within the country, especially those working with that group
• Representatives from Bible Translation agencies such as the Bible Societies, IBT

But what about including church leaders from the wider churches, those that speaker the language of wider communication? They often feel excluded from what we are doing, and we do tend to exclude them because they seem not to have an immediate interest in it, and don't usually speak the language. There is also the issue of religious background. If the socio-ethnic group is MBB or insider, the LWC churches are often against the kind of language used in the translation, seeing it as syncretistic, or just plain heretical. It's very difficult to know whether to include them or not. If we include them, they may well force us down a certain route (literal translation, no attempt at contextualisation or use of natural MBB language). If, however, we don't include them the translation will only be used by the MBB or insider readers/hearers and not at all by the wider church. Sometimes folk in the Bible Translation world suggest that two translations are needed - one for the church, and one for MBBs and others. This, however, is not such a good idea, as outsiders can compare the two translations, point out the differences, and 'prove' that we have corrupted the Bible. Let's remember that whatever goes into print will be 'The Bible' for some time to come, and will be taken as authoritative, inspired, and so on. We need to think more carefully about such audience issues before starting projects, and one tool to enable us to do this is the project brief. This should be written not just by the project coordinator with input from the team and consultant, but including as many partners as possible. The project will then get off to a good start, with clear 'ends' in sight. Please let's spend more time working on relationships and partnership-building at the local level. For this to happen we need good project coordinators, not necessarily with a linguistic background. Will you join us?

WEA Panel Posts its Report

The WEA panel has posted its report and the SIL director has responded to it. You can read what he has said here:

http://www.sil.org/about/news/sil-executive-director-describes-changes-response-wea-panel-report

and the report itself here:

http://worldea.org/news/4212/wea-independent-bible-translation-review-panel-concludes-its-work-issues-report-with-ten-recommendations-for-wycliffe-and-sil 

What do you think? Do you have any questions? Feedback? This could be a good place to post them.

Syncretism

As we hand over more and more to national colleagues to do Bible Translation and be in charge of their own exegesis there is always going to be a danger of syncretism. The pendulum can swing from appropriate contextualisation to syncretistic approaches that over-emphasise local, traditional beliefs. To avoid this there is a temptation to choose translators and consultants who are demonstrably ‘sound’ – they can sign all the correct doctrinal statements, and have been trained by all the right (Western-funded[1]) theological institutions, as well as having been instructed by missionary trainers and consultants on how to do dynamic translations that make truth clear and simple. This would be fine if it were not for the fact that there are some much more subtle influences coming into play. In India, for instance, scriptures, to sound true, must be beautiful literature written in poetic form. If we, as outsiders, over-stress the clear, simple (propositional truth?) meaning of scripture we can do violence to the national translator’s desire to write beautiful literature that will be read and accepted by many as a holy book. The missionary-advised translation is useful, but only for evangelism. As soon as a church is in existence the believers crave a translation that reads and sounds like a holy book. And so it is that the church starts a second translation project, perhaps producing a high-literary style and somewhat more word-for-word translation that can be preached from.

It may be worth pointing out that within the Bible there are a variety of literary forms, and some books ought not to be high style. The gospel of Mark is one of those. But Psalms, Proverbs, the Prophets, John’s gospel, and many other parts of the Bible can be written in beautiful language and still reflect the genre of the original scriptures. This is probably the best way to go – choosing to work on the books that are high in style first, so that the people and language group accept these books as scripture, before moving onto books that ought really to be in a simple straight-forward style.

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[1] These will often have a particular bias, e.g. reformed, pentecostal, charismatic and teach some kind of systematic theology, or worse still, a theology so influenced by modernism that folk enter as believers and come out as cynics.

Building Bridges

Whenever we share the gospel with someone we need to build bridges of friendship first. In sharing the gospel with those from other cultures we have to build a bridge of friendship and also a bridge between our culture and their culture, and more importantly between biblical culture and their culture. Our world-view affects the way we see things. It can be thought of as the spectacles with which we view the world.

Certain things appear more clear, other things may not come into focus at all. In building bridges we are ideally trying to find concepts and practices in their culture that match biblical ones. Often mismatches occur and these have to be explained. For instance in the Bible sacrifices were part of the worship of a believer’s life. They also had certain functions like removing sin. In many parts of the world sacrifices are carried out to ward off the evil eye and make sure nothing unfortunate happens to a person and their family. This is very different! Therefore we can’t simply use the word ‘sacrifice’ and assume it will be understood. The good thing about Bible translation, of course, is that words are usually explained in the context of stories. It is pretty obvious that Abraham offered sacrifices as part of his spiritual life, not because he was afraid of evil spirits or the evil eye or whatever. In the project we work in we have sometimes found some very nice bridges. One is the word for Yahweh. We translated it as Biribar (the One who is) in Exodus 3. This is very close to the biblical meaning of Yahweh in that passage, which is the derived meaning of the name in the language, its ‘etymology’. Another bridge is to try and use a better term for ‘peace’ than one that means lack of war. We used ‘salamat’ which means ‘healthy/whole’, but it also sounds like the word used in greetings, ‘salam’. So ‘Peace be with you!’ at the end of John’s gospel has been translated ‘Be whole!’ but sounds quite natural as a greeting.