Designed to Make Errors
As a missionary kid I was always surrounded by friends and strangers who
believed in my parents and by extension me.
In the mid-1960’s a support organization, Wycliffe
Associates (WA), was set up to help Wycliffe Bible Translators with their
mission. WA would provide support to WBT, and to their missionaries, allowing
WBT to stay tightly focused on Bible translation. My Mom was the first
secretary for WA, along with Sarah Pease, back in 1967.
We often took advantage of the hospitality homes they
organized to benefit the WBT missionaries. As you can imagine, full-time
missionaries don’t often own homes, but when we would travel or go on furlough,
we needed a place to stay. I remember our car piled high with suitcases on the
top and sitting on suitcases on the back seat with the four of us kids stuffed
in the back seat. One the furlough that I turned 12 I would put nail polish on
my nails on the long trips and it would drive my brother crazy.
We would stay in many different wonderful people’s homes.
When we were younger, we would have to stop at a park first to get our energy
out. I was the most extroverted one of the four of us children and was the one
picked to ask if we could be excused from the table and watch TV.
Because of being so blessed by Wycliffe Associates
volunteers when I moved to the US, I wanted to be involved with Wycliffe
Associates. I became the area coordinator for the banquets and signed up to be
a host home. My mother was also a speaker with their banquet tours. I was
always happy when she spoke with the banquet tour because she could speak but
not take care of any of the driving, set up and arranging that she normally
handles herself.
Recently, however, I have come to have strong reservations
about the direction in which WA is heading. In 2014, Wycliffe Associates enacted a plan to transform
what was always a support organization into a stand-alone Bible translation
organization. In their new mission of Bible translation, Wycliffe Associates has
focused on making translation as fast as possible using a methodology called
MAST - Mobilized Assistance Supporting Translation. They have abandoned their
original mission and turned away from the vision set forth at their founding.
The MAST methodology prioritizes speed over accuracy, and it is this change
which fills me with dread. While I applaud WA for wanting to get God’s Word to
every Bible-less group as quickly as possible – any Bible translator would –
their willingness to sacrifice accuracy has made me realize I can no longer
support them.
Many of you have no Bible translation experience, so I will
give you an overview of how Wycliffe Bible Translators works, and how Wycliffe
Associates is claiming they can accomplish the same goal in a fraction of the
time.
When Wycliffe Bible Translators begin a translation project
for a language group, the first step is to evaluate the complexity and nature
of the language they are dealing with. In effect, the translators must learn
the rules of that language and in the process write a sort of textbook
outlining those rules. Many languages which lack a Bible translation also lack
an alphabet or grammar description. For many translation projects, they must
start with devising a scientific alphabet. This step alone took my parents years
to get through. Granted my parents didn’t have computers in the early years,
but they also weren’t even translating anything yet. They were just codifying a
written version of the Nabak language. This step is needed not just for
translation, but also to teach literacy to the people of that language group,
and later to others on the project for whom that language isn’t their native
tongue.
Since the Bible has many different patterns to it –
rebuking, storytelling, technical descriptions of how to build something etc. –
we had to learn the Nabak language in all those different ways, so it would
follow those natural conversational patterns. For a proper and accurate
translation, some variation of this is needed for every language. For
the Nabak translation, we produced Morphology, Syntax and Cohesion in Nabak,
Papua New Guinea.
During this process translations started for simple Bible
stories, making a small number of copies of each story, and sharing them with
the Nabak people. WBT doesn’t want stacks of imperfect Bible translations
distorting the final, most correct, finished version of a New Testament.
Based on the feedback from the Nabak people we would learn
more about the culture, and in the process improve the translation. This is an
important point; subtle cultural variations, taboos, gender roles and so forth
are incredibly important in achieving a truly accurate final translation. During
this part of the work, again taking years, we often had to rely on certain
older men who were known to have the deepest grasp of the language, and of the
cultural traditions. They might be called the orators or storytellers of the
Nabak people.
As the translation grew to encompass more of the New
Testament, the translation had a greater and greater proficiency and clarity.
Working with Nabak people who had no previous exposure to the work is important. This part of the process is designed to dig deep into
the meanings of the most complex passages.
After two decades of work in Papua New Guinea my parents
were still catching many errors. Most were not in the translation per se, but
in the cultural assumptions and implications the Nabak people picked up through
cultural reference that we simply could never have caught. To imagine this, we
Americans will say “it’s a piece of cake” or “I need a ballpark figure,” and if
you think about it, there are “boatloads” of context and subtext in those phrases.
We couldn’t have possibly caught errors like this if we didn’t also go back and
forth with a Greek language expert who cross-checked the translation.
After all of this work, I saw my parents go through every
book of the New Testament line by line, word by word themselves, then with
Nabak orators followed by average Nabak speakers and the Greek translation
checker, they were then done - with the first draft.
The quickest translation I know of done following this
format, in the standard Wycliffe Bible Translators way, took four full years.
It was one of those unique situations where there were seriously dedicated and
well-educated Christian national translators eager to work on the project, and
multiple other variables in exactly the best place possible. This was in
essence a “dream team” of translation excellence and servant hearts. The Greek
consultant said it nearly killed him to keep ahead of the translation team, and
this translation still took four years.
That is why when I hear of a translation of the Bible
completed in mere months, I know it could not possibly be accurate. Such a
lightning-speed translation is undoubtedly missing accuracy and some beautiful expressions
of His Truth.
Let’s do a quick comparison of this process to the MAST
process. Wycliffe Associates offers a two-week training at the beginning of any
MAST project. You might wonder, as I did, how WA could even begin to teach all
the concepts and techniques Edmund and I had to use, and believe me, there is a
great deal I am leaving out. The simple answer is, they can’t, so they don’t
even try. They rely on everyday people who speak the language – not the
educated people or those most experienced with the language and customs – to do
a blind draft translation with no community cross-checking. They then
self-check and peer check, to catch what errors they can. It is a system with
no deep analysis and no meticulous linguistic review.
It is a system designed to make errors.
WA says they can do an entire translation in a few months,
weeks, or even days. How does that seem possible? If you compare our 29 years
against, say, five months, in terms of a pregnancy, we had a baby in nine
months and the MAST process gives them a baby in less than nine hours! Now weigh that against the time which is more
typical of translations done by Wycliffe Bible Translators using current
technological advances; 5-15 years for the New Testament. There is simply no
comparison between the translations that would come out of those two processes.
I can’t help but wonder: If a team decided to
translate To Kill A Mocking Bird, would
they be able to do it justice in just a few weeks? How could they possibly capture
the cultural nuance in another language so quickly? Readers would be up in arms
if they saw a poor rendering of that classic American novel. How can
translating the Bible, God’s love letter, in such a slipshod and hasty manner
do His Truth justice?
The truth is, sadly, that it can’t.
Need help with Terms
and Acronyms?
WBT- Wycliffe Bible Translators. For 77 years Wycliffe
has helped people around the world translate the Bible into their
own languages. https://www.wycliffe.org/
WA- Wycliffe Associates. Wycliffe Associates accelerates Bible translation around the world by empowering national translators. They have been doing
translation for 4 years using the MAST process. www.wycliffeassociates.org
MAST- Mobilized Assistance Supporting Translation.
WGA- Wycliffe Global Alliance. As a community of
participants in God’s mission, the Wycliffe Global Alliance offers leadership,
influence and service within Bible translation movements. http://www.wycliffe.net/en/
WEA- World Evangelical Alliance. WEA is a network of
churches and organizations in 129 nations joining together to give a platform
to 600 million Christians. https://www.worldea.org/
SIL- SIL serves language communities worldwide,
building their capacity for sustainable language development by means of
research, translation, training and materials development. Sister
organization to WBT. https://www.sil.org/
Linguistics- Linguistics illuminates patterns and
variety in the structure and use of language, providing a foundation for language
development work of all kinds.
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