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.