Ye Olde Testament
What Would You Do?
While doing translation checks in the community, some of the leaders of the area demand that you make the translation sound more formal (like the King James) or they’ll not accept it. They don’t like that the Bible sounds like normal language that everyone can understand, having grown up hearing it in ‘old’ Swahili. What would you do?
October 2, 2009 at 11:02 pm
[...] The chroNICHOLLS of Tanzania « chroNICHOLLS May-June 2009 Ye Olde Translation [...]
October 3, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Hence therefore ye shall changeth their mindith and go forth teaching them that is is bestith if they allowith all thy subjects to understand thy Holy Word in a more simple way. Concvince them they are wrong and you are right.
October 3, 2009 at 8:03 pm
lol… nice to hear from you, er, thee, Mark.
October 5, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I think it’s worth pointing out that the English King James version (and possibly the Old Swahili version?) were written to be generally understood by the people for whom it was written, just as the New Testament itself was written in ‘Koine’ Greek (that is to say the ‘common’ language of the day), and all of the Scriptures reflect the common language and prose of the day in which they were written.
I find it unlikely that when Moses was delivering the Law to the Children of Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai that he spoke in some unusual and archaic language that reflected a more distant culture of yester-year as opposed to the common language of that day.
October 6, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Tell them to stop being picky and to do it themselves
October 6, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Prayerfully guide them to God’s blessing all His children with His gift of salvation and wisdom.
October 8, 2009 at 10:18 am
I should mention that this particular WWYD question is purely hypothetical, and in fact we haven’t encountered this kind of issue with any communities. All the communities I’ve visited have been really positive to getting the Bible in their own, normal language of today. I just thought it would be a good topic for discussion.
Anyway, if this came up, I think I’d start by initiating discussions with the leaders about translation principles, about how Jesus used the language of his day, how Jesus would speak to them in their language if he came to them today, and about how people need to hear God’s Word in the language that speaks to their heart, not the language that was normal 100-200 years ago. But failing that, I think we’d have to find a compromise, because it would be better to have a more formal translation that was being used than a clearer translation that was rejected.
One of the processes that we use in training our own Tanzanian translators is to collect stories and texts in their mother-tongue, and then when translation issues come up, we refer back to those texts to see how the language treats certain things that come up. It helps ensure that we’re getting natural language translations, and not translations based on christiany sounding phrases that have come out of years of hearing the Bible in formal Swahili.
A good example of christianese creeping into translation is a phrase I heard read out from the HCSB version (which I posted on another website):
Acts 1:9
After He had said this, He was taken up as they were watching, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.
Two things stand out as being non-standard English; the most glaring is ‘a cloud received Him’. That’s just not normal English.
“Did you see that helicopter?”
“Yes, for a bit, but then a cloud received it.”
Also, to my ears, ‘He was taken up’ makes it sound like there was a visible or knowable agent. Perhaps a clearer translation would be:
After He had said this, He began to rise up into the sky as they were watching, and passed through a cloud out of their sight.
It is still accurate, but it doesn’t sound like christianese, and it makes what happened so much clearer.
October 15, 2009 at 5:04 pm
i’m glad you clarified that it’s not a real situation, coz i was getting really frustrated. what would be the point in translating it if they prefer the old swahili version anyway. might as well leave it. but i’m fighting my own battle against kjversionists. but there’d be no point in translating if they prefer the old versions.