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.