Jeff Adams

Weitenauer Bibel

As we reflect on The Mission, I want to point out the central role of those who dedicate themselves to translate the scriptures into the mother tongues of the peoples of the world. Our church has always been committed to the authority and centrality of the scriptures in our lives as followers of Jesus, and that is also reflected in our participation in The Mission. One of the first couples sent out of KCBT were Wycliffe translators Orville and Mary Johnson giving over 30 years of their lives to translate the New Testament into the Secoya language of a tribal group in Ecuador. More recently we financed the completion of two New Testament translation projects into indigenous languages of central Mexico and an Old Testament project in another region of Mexico. The two New Testament projects are nearing completion, and the Old Testament project is advancing nicely.

I was reading another of the old mission texts sent to me by a friend. This one, Christianity and the Progress of Man by William Douglas Mackenzie, was published in 1897. He devotes an entire chapter to the missionary as translator. At the end of the 1700′s the Bible existed only in about 50 languages, most of them European. When Mackenzie wrote at the end of the 1800′s, that number had risen to almost 400 languages with at least a part of the Bible in that language. Today, of the over 6,900 known languages, over 2,000 still have no part of the Bible translated, and many others have only a portion. That figure represents over 350 million people who cannot read the scriptures in their heart language.

If you speak other languages, you have an appreciation for the difficulty of translation from one language to the other. Menkenzie relates the following.

For example, can anything be more pathetic than the position of the first missionaries to Greenland, who found themselves unable to reach the people without the Scriptures, and yet unable to translate them, because they were uneducated men without a knowledge of the grammar of their own language! Yet these men did surmount even those frowning mountains of difficulty by the exercise of a humble and patient courage, and began to reduce the Esquimaux language to writing. They and their successors toiled at the workd till the entire Scriptures were translated .

I could fill pages talking about some of the crazy language boo boo’s I and others have committed. Imagine the challenge of those who translate scripture in written form and want to avoid any major blunders that would be recorded for generations.

Again, Mackenzie gives us a some examples from his generation.

In a certain part of India difficulty has been found with the word “flesh.” The nearest native equivalent which could be found meant “flesh-meat” in distinction from bone or blood. It is easy to see what ludicrous misunderstandings this word would suggest in many parts of Scripture. For example one native, on the text, “I will not fear what flesh can do to me,” said: “It is plain enough, but it is a very curious thing to say. It means of course, ‘I will not fear even though the eating of flesh causes me indigestion.’” In Japanese the translators finding no word for “kiss” had to manufacture one, and then, I suppose, had to explain its meaning. In a certain West African language, the missionaries found that in translating the word “heaven,” they had employed a native word signifying only “at the top of a tree” or “of a pole.”

First, be thankful that we have a great history of the scriptures in the English language. Second, keep translators in your prayers. Third, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into the harvest to tackle the over 2,000 languages still with not a single verse of scripture.