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A History of Bible Translation: Introduction

People sometimes ask me when the work of Bible translation will be finished. I know why they’re asking. They want Jesus to come back. They want to know if they’ll still be alive when he does. The problem is that there always has been and always will be Bible translation going on. It isn’t the kind of task you start today, finish sometime next month, and then tick the box and move on. As cultures develop and communities change there is often a need for a new translation. Not only that, previous translations may seem to be out-of-date and irrelevant, or simply not very good.[1] Another question I get asked is why Bible translation takes so long? Why can’t we, in the age of advanced computers and globalisation, speed the process up? The problem is that computers aren’t human, and can’t produce a translation good enough for use by humans. Having said that humans are, after all, only human, and tend to make mistakes, albeit smaller ones than computers. When thinking about Bible translation most people compare it with translations like the New International Version, which had a ‘small’ committee of sixteen famous theologians working on it. Despite that, they took seventeen years to complete version one, and they’ve been producing new versions (of the New International Version) ever since. Comparing that with, at the other extreme, a couple of relatively untrained translators with only primary education working in a village, seems to be taking things too far. Those working with and advising such translators don’t know the language fluently, and the translators often don’t know Hebrew and Greek at all, nor do they know the background of the Bible well enough for the task in hand, therefore there isn’t one person on the project who knows everything they need to know in order to get the job done. The expression, ‘It takes two to tango’ comes to mind. It takes a team to translate. These days there is much more emphasis on training mother-tongue translators at workshops, and providing consultant help at both these and during visits to the team. Nevertheless, work often progresses slowly, and for good reasons.[2]

Few people know how complex the work of Bible translation is. One of the reasons I have written this book is to show how difficult it has been to put the Bible into local, spoken languages, and how much opposition to this process there has been. Many translators have died in the saddle, as it were, and not just from old age. Opposition has come from many quarters, including traditionally-minded church leaders who were quite happy with the status quo of having the priests in the know and the laity ignorant of Scripture. Putting the Scriptures into the modern spoken language of the day seemed sacrilege to them. Today opposition is more likely to come from other quarters – governments who are afraid to promote minority languages, or religious leaders who see Bible translation as a missionary activity, designed to cause the growth of local churches amongst communities all over the country. And so it is, as we shall hopefully see.



[1] Not good for the purpose they were intended for, that is. This is often because the translators have a hidden agenda, such as promoting the literary language, or competing with a neighbouring tribe. This is all very well, but we need translations that meet a felt need, not ones the boost someone’s ego.
[2] The NIV committee spent a lot of time deciding the parameters of the translation they were working on, key terms, and so on. Translations carried out in other parts of the world are often advised to leave decisions on key terms until later in the project, and keep such decisions as flexible as possible, as more data is needed to be able to make such hard choices.
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