Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Translation Process

Any translation goes through several stages before it is published: Drafting Team check Exegetical check Test & Review Lastly a consultant meets with the team and discusses any translation issues, making suggestion for changes before it is published. I'm now going to unpack why each stage is needed and what happens during each stage. Draft: the translator studies the passage, preferably in the original language, but if not, s/he compares several different versions in several different languages, and makes an oral draft (or sometimes they listen to several different audio versions instead). They do this by closing all their books, if they have any open, then speaking the passage into a recording device (like a smartphone). At least 2-3 verses are drafted at a time, then the translator listens to their recording, and checks they haven't left anything out. They might then keyboard it into their computer, using a program called ' Paratext '. Why do we dr

Folks, it's not a Communication Issue!

We are used to talking about Bible translation in terms of communication. Missiologists talk often talk about 'bridges' used for sharing the good news, which is also a communication metaphor - we have something we want to communicate, but we need a bridge, a way of expressing it, some kind of packaging for it, so that it communicates correctly (or hides whats inside the package, if we interpret the metaphor literally). This is a misunderstanding for two reasons: It is a false assumption that we have 'correctly' understood the good news. Unfortunately we have only understood a representation of the good news for our own culture . It doesn't matter how we package it, this will be misunderstood or irrelevant to the receptor culture (the primary audience in question). For instance, those in the minority world often explain the good news in terms of our guilt before a just God who has to punish sin, and that He, in Christ, took that punishment on our behalf to make us

How to Carry Out an Eight Conditions Analysis

You might have heard of Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions for Scripture Engagement . How can an analysis of a project be carried out? The simplest way is to use these online Google forms . Here are the steps: Get your team and partners together. Have someone teach Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions (or ask everyone to read it beforehand in the LWC) Fill in the first form. Give the condition an overall rating out of five. Five is high, one is low. Fill in the second to eighth forms and give them ratings. Work out which conditions have the lowest ratings. Start working to try and bring those conditions up. Work out a Scripture Engagement strategy for that people and adapt your project accordingly. For ease of use I've posted the links to the forms below, with some instructions: The Eight Conditions Questionnaire in Eight Parts The Eight Conditions questionnaire is now online in eight separate parts so you can answers short questionnaires on just one condition at a ti

Holistic Mission

We often talk about holistic mission. What does that mean? It's about mission to the whole person not just their 'soul' (inner being). There's nothing unspiritual about meeting someone's basic needs for food, clothing and so on. In fact we encouraged to do so. ...learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. Isaiah 1:17 ESV http://bible.com/59/isa.1.17.ESV We also have Jesus' example to follow: Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. Luke 8:35 ESV http://bible.com/59/luk.8.35.ESV Both his physical and spiritual needs had been met by Jesus. Lastly, you might ask how this works in  mission. Those working within a community are often told of needs within that community. How can these be met? Well, those with medic

Pithy Perfection

New English translations of the Bible are very popular these days. People often ask me which one is best, or which I prefer. The answer is complicated: I'm not keen on archaic words in translation, which means I don't use KJV much, or even NIV, which follows it to a certain extent Sometimes it's good to expand the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek to make it clearer, especially when there is an assumption made because the original audience would have known something that we don't. It should be implicit information though Genre is often ignored by translations. The Bible is rich and varied. We don't want Proverbs to be like a story or sermon. They're supposed to be short and pithy to have greater impact. Hebrew often skips verbs to achieve that. We may not be able to go that far, but translations should keep proverbs as short as possible. Likewise poetry should have rhythm, alliteration and other poetic features, albeit using the richness of the English la

How to Reduce Inequality

How can Scripture Engagement activities reduce inequality within a society? If you Google this question you find that no one is writing on the issue. Either inequality or Scripture engagement will be crossed out. Within SIL the literacy department is more interested in how to reduce inequality. Education is something that can be made available to all, whatever their background. There is one thing to think about, though. Disadvantaged communities are often lacking Scriptures because: The Scriptures haven't yet been translated into their language Parts of Scripture are available in book format, but the people can't read Parts of Scripture are available in book format, but they haven't been distributed to that village yet Parts of Scripture are available in digital format but people don't have smart phones etc. An increasing focus on digital engagement doesn't necessarily help, unless careful research shows that e.g. feature phones are to some extent av

Postmillenials

So there's a lot of discussion at the moment about why postmillenials are leaving the church. I'd like to suggest one possible reason, and that's an inappropriate explanation of the gospel. Evangelicals tend towards using a substitutionary atonement theology in their explanations: we're sinners, we deserve God's wrath, Christ took the punishment we deserved, and so on. The trouble with this is that it really doesn't resonate with a postmillenial view of the world.  Firstly people don't think of themselves as sinners. To believe we are sinners means accepting a world where God is judge, there are clear rules, we have broken them, and that puts us in the dock, as it were. We're like criminals. But millenials don't feel that way. Another option, according to Jayson Georges' book 3D Gospel , is that people see themselves as shaming their family or peer group or 'clan' (again, a kind of peer group), and that this causes a break in

On Orality (why oral-literate isn't the only spectrum to think about)

Since Walter Ong's book back in the 80s many have written on the oral-literate spectrum. Maxey , amongst others, correctly criticises the polarising of oral and literate cultures, and points out that it's easy to read 'primitive' for 'oral' and 'developed' for 'literate' - not a divide we want to promote in these post-colonial (or global) days. I want to bring up another issue. It seems to me that oral-literate is not the only relevant spectrum. We also need to consider mono-cultural to multi-cultural, and monolingual to multilingual spectra. If the people we are working with are fairly mono-cultural this will also affect the way people think. (I was going to say that people are less likely to be able to think the way others think, but in light of recent events such as Brexit, the election of right-wing leaders, and so on, it seems we're pretty poor at that in Western countries too.) Another important factor is that Western cultures ten

The Idiom 'Son of'

Here, just for fun, are some idioms containing the phrase 'son of' in Hebrew: בְנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים   – ‘sons of the god(s)’ (Gen 6:2) i.e. heavenly beings  cf  Psa 29:1 וְנֹחַ בֶּן־שֵׁשׁ מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה   – ‘Noah was son of six hundred years’ (Gen 7:6) i.e. he was six hundred years old בְנֵי־קֶדֶם   –  ‘sons of the East’ (Gen 29:1) i.e. eastern peoples אֶת־בֶּן הַבָּקָר  – ‘son of the herd’   (Lev 1:5) i.e. one [animal] of the herd וּבְנֵי בְלִיַּעַל   –  ‘son of worthlessness’ (1Sa 10:27; 1Ki 21:10, 13  cf  Dan 11:14) i.e. troublemakers, scoundrels הָאָדָם   בְּנֵי   –  ‘sons of man’ (1Sa 26:19) i.e. men, humans לִבְנֵי־חַיִל   – ‘sons of strength’ (2Sa 2:7; 13:28; 17:10…) i.e. brave בְנֵֽי־עַוְלָ֖ה   – ‘sons of injustice’ (2Sa 3:34; 7:10  cf  Hos 10:9) i.e. criminals בֶן־מָוֶת  – ‘son of death’ (2Sa 12:5) – i.e. someone who deserves to die אֶחָד מִבְּנֵי הַנְּבִיאִים – ‘one of the sons of the prophets’ (1Ki 20:35) i.e. a member of the prophetic fraternity

We are chosen, we are free

Do you know the Tim Hughes song Holding Nothing Back . It goes like this, 'I am chosen I am free'? It should really be, 'We are chosen, we are free.' Why? Because all those verses saying we're chosen are plural . Here are some examples: What joy for the nation whose God is the LORD, whose people he has chosen as his inheritance. Psalm 33:22 You did not choose me, but I chose you [plural] and appointed you to go and bear fruit–fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you [plural] whatever you [plural] ask in my name. John 15:16  Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. Ephesian 1:4-5 Since God chose you [plural] to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humili

Scripture Engagement and Language Development

In Wycliffe/SIL we talk a lot about how Bible translation can contribute towards language development. For minority languages this is true. That is not the main motivation behind our involvement in BT ministry though. Most of us want to see lives and communities impacted by the gospel. So we have a scripture engagement end in sight - changed lives! We have overlapping SE and LD goals that we can neatly label holistic mission, especially when literacy is part of the programme. Isn't it time we acknowledged holistic mission as our main raison d'être? This might help many of our partners see that we share a common vision. Here's a visual journey through my thinking:

A Flow Chart for Bible Translation (a Relevance Theory Approach)

One of the current theories behind modern translation work is Relevance Theory. [1] Here is a flow chart that explains the process often used to produce a draft when using such an approach: *Make sure your translation committee makes the decision as to what kind of translation they want. A domesticated translation is one that submits to dominant values in the target language [2] whereas a foreignized translation is one that is happy to import foreign terms and ideas from Hebrew, Greek, or the language of wider communication such as the Greek term baptizo . The chart looks something like this: Text                                   Communicated Ideas                  Context A sower went out to sow  A farmer went out to sow grain   People scattered/threw seed etc. The text has very little information, but behind it is the idea that seed was scatted by throwing it from a bag carried round the farmer's shoulder. This could be explained in the para-