A Lie, Repeated
“A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.” – Mark Twain
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The fact that Wycliffe Associates is using lies in an internal sense – they are being deceitful about their history, their finances, their goals – is hard enough to accept. After all, they did so much good for so many years, nearly half a century, that I have to wonder how they came to their current lowly state. Sadly though, their manipulation of the truth extends far out from Wycliffe Associates, and has infected many parts of the Bible translation world.
Here is a list of 11 strikes against them as pertains to the outer workings of the organization.
1. Other reputable organizations won’t work with the MAST process or translations that come from it, most notably the Bible Translation Association of Papua New Guinea, the Translation Association of the Philippines, the Jesus Film Project, Wycliffe Bible Translators, The Seed Company and Wycliffe Global Alliance.
2. The Seed Company states, “We have not been able to substantiate the strong claim that application of the MAST methodology results in the accelerated production of accurate, distribution-ready translation of scripture.”
3. Vision 2025: In 1999, Wycliffe Bible Translators leaders came up with the goal of Vision 2025[i], wanting to imagine that a difficult goal would spark urgency in Christians to move Bible Translation at a faster pace. Vision 2025 was to have a translation started in every language by 2025. When this goal was announced I was in PNG, and we all wondered how that could be possible.
But Wycliffe Associates now claims the goal as their own. Not that Wycliffe Bible Translators has the one and only license on that idea, but it’s one more area in which Wycliffe Associates ‘looks’ connected to Wycliffe Bible Translators when they simply are not.
As if that weren’t enough, Wycliffe Associates had to one-up Wycliffe Bible Translators by making Vision 2025 even more ambitious. Their new version of the goal is to have the New Testament not just started, but completely translated into every language by 2025. Why steal someone’s goal and then change the meaning of that goal?
4. Anointed or Self-Anointed? WA gives themselves the title of: “One of the world’s leading Bible translation organizations, Wycliffe Associates”[ii] To start with, there is no list of ‘top’ Bible translation organizations, and WA having only been in the translation work for 4 years shouldn’t warrant being on this non-existent list. This is a lie invented for self-aggrandizement, and it is an insult to those organizations who have been doing the true work of Bible translation for decades.
5. Call it a draft- not a translation: I have many friends who study the Bible diligently. Lise, spends 10 hours a week to prepare for a 45-minute lesson each Sunday. Her group of dedicated ladies gather to study the Bible, and they all bring their Hebrew commentaries for every lesson. They don’t take the word of the Bible study instructor; they want to research it themselves. It’s one thing to have a home Bible Study where everyone can pipe up and say what they think it means, but we wouldn’t call them Biblical experts.
A Bible Translator friend says: “We cringe whenever we hear the claim that a ‘translation’ can be done in a matter of weeks—a draft, maybe, but not a translation.”
Phyllis Porter says: “They need to call the resulting MAST translations drafts or paraphrases only.”
They should all be labeled, “This a first draft translation completed by two native speakers. This rough draft is without a Village-Check and a Greek Consultant Check this should NOT be considered an accurate translation. Further analysis is needed for accuracy, grammar, consistency, and readability.”
For the American audience WA should also call them drafts and not translations. They take credit for completing It’s moving that language closer to having an accurate translation and they can be proud of that but it is still a draft. Shouldn’t this be called a draft?
6. Divided-ness: A translator in Africa, wrote about a point I hadn’t even thought of when I started writing this blog series: “I know from my own experience and from what I have heard in the past few years that another extremely dangerous outgrowth of the WA’s new work is the division that it has created on the [mission] field. Because of their choice to ‘go alone’, there is often no longer a willingness or desire to work with the experienced SIL/Wycliffe workers in a given country. The testimony of divided-ness among those supposedly doing the same work is not what pleases the Lord. I pray for our leaders to humble themselves and find reconciliation in order to accomplish this work together for the glory of the Lord.” I heard stories like this from everyone who wrote to me, from different countries.
7. Lying about the Patpatar people: A 3-page newsletter came from WA dated June 25th, 2018, telling of the great changes that had come about because of their work with the Patpatar people in Papua New Guinea. They even mentioned specifics, such as a witch doctor named Kiung. I contacted Ed Condra, the WBT translator who works with the Patpatar people on the island of New Ireland to ask him of the veracity of the story. He responded:
Your email is distressing if they [WA] are indeed even implying that anything I am involved in is of the same type of translation upon which they have recently embarked.
In earlier years WA actually did financially support the New Ireland Translation Institute, a multilingual project the people and I started in 2006. NITI had 12 translation projects operating originally, five of which I was working in; the Patpatar Psalms, three Patpatar dialects adaptations, and one new project, the Barok language.
NITI conducts our work in exactly the same way as other SIL translations. Every consultant knows the language/s for which he or she is responsible. Each consultant is an SIL trained translator, most with significant prior translation experience. Every book is checked by an outside-of-NITI SIL translation consultant, or Seed Company trained consultant. So, neither I nor NITI is remotely following the speeded-up translation methods WA advocates—which [you and I] both know are preposterous if one wants a truly faithful translation.
I remain appreciative for how WA helped fund NITI for years, but that was all before they started their accelerated methodology. They pulled out their support of NITI when they broke with WBT.
Your email said they spoke of a person named Kiung. There is no such person in the Patpatar program or any of the 12 projects that are or were involved with at NITI.
It seems like an exciting story for a newsletter but in actual fact they had no part in any of the translating. They had no input whatsoever into the Patapatar translation, or the other projects that were completed in the NITI building. They didn’t want to have a part in it, they were experts in support.
So, WA provided funds for the NITI building from 2006-2016. Then two years later they steal the story and even sensationalize the story by adding a witch-doctor to show the wonderful work they are doing. No mention of the WBT work, the other national translators, or Ed Condra. This isn’t the behavior of a truthful, God-fearing organization.
I wonder how many other stories they’ve stolen but the average American receiving these letters doesn’t know the difference.
8. Undermining what others are doing: A Bible translator friend with a PhD in linguistics, said that “the MAST translation strategy is undermining everything that we in SIL and WBT are trying to do”. He has seen firsthand what is happening on the ground and said, “It’s worse than what we imagined.” Wycliffe Associates goes to local people working with WBT and offers to pay them twice as much. They woo the trained national translators and the translator switches to WA, because they need the money. It is a pattern. This is the reason that some of the translations are passing accuracy tests, because the translators have already been trained by others.
9. Oral Translations: As if the sloppy way they do translation wasn’t careless enough, wait until you hear how they do translations for languages that don’t have an alphabet. Speed is paramount above all other concerns, so instead of doing all the ‘bother’ of linguistics, which involves creating an alphabet, they have a bilingual speaker read the Bible in one language, then speak off the top of their head, ‘translating’ itinto their language into a recording device. This is then called a translation and is published.
In any world except the world of WA this would be called ‘interpretation’ and used for conversations and communication, certainly not translation of literature or God’s Word.
10. Stolen App: Bruce Smith wrote in his blog, “God’s Word in every language took a giant step toward reality as our TranslationStudio was released for free download in the Google Play store”[iii] I contacted Unfolding Word because I didn’t see anything on their website about a connection with WA. They said, “TranslationStudio is an open source project that we've developed over the past several years. Many people and organizations use the tool to translate unfoldingWord® Open Bible Stories and the Bible into many languages. We are not directly affiliated with WA although they use our tool.” Why does WA call the app theirs, when it isn’t?[iv]
11. Ownership? The WA website states: “Ownership begins with church members being empowered to translate Scripture and ensure the quality of the translation.”[v] Does this set off alarm bells for you, too? Would I trust my local church to oversee translating the Bible from Spanish (a source language) to English for me? No!
We don’t allow this for English- why would we encourage this in other languages. We expect our English Bible Translators to have Doctorates and years of experience.
To me, there is also another layer. Instead of valuing the local people, the MAST process devalues them. WA might claim that it is trusting and empowering local peoples, but what they are really saying is: “You’re not worth it. You can’t have access to all the time, experts and resources that our English translations get. You only get the two-week version, and you are then responsible for anything that goes wrong.”
Is it partnering with the local church when they say, “Translate the Bible yourself, as fast as you can - now have a nice life.”
Ron Taylor states, “This ‘translation-on-steroids‘ approach would seem to exemplify what is categorized as a “paraphrase”, disregarding the sanctity of diverse cultural expressions. This would seem to be a ‘counter-gospel’ simply imposing an imperialistic mandate on unsuspecting, well-intentioned peoples.”
Wycliffe Associates is devaluing local people by not supporting them enough.
Wycliffe Associates is devaluing God’s word with slipshod translations.
Wycliffe Associates is devaluing honest supporters by misleading them. I consider these serious concerns! Do you?
[i] http://www.wycliffe.net/about-us/more?id=7988
[ii] https://wycliffeassociates.org/who-we-are/for-the-press/press-release/687
[iii] https://brucesmith.wycliffeassociates.org/2014/10/09/introducing-translationstudio/
[iv] https://www.unfoldingword.org/
[v] https://wycliffeassociates.org/what-we-do/translation-strategies/mast-white-paper-introduction
Comments
Post a Comment