A Little More on Translating into the Culture, not just the Language.
Two weeks ago, I published an article on the need to translate the Bible not only into the Language of a people group, but also into their Culture. Most of the responses were very much in favour of the concept I was describing, but there were some readers who wondered about Moses’ warning in Deuteronomy 4:20.
“Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it but keep the commands of the Lord your God that I give you.”
Bible translators through the ages have had to struggle not only with the language forms but also with how the readers will interpret the words used.
When the main Wycliffe translation consultant reviewed our translation of Acts, we encountered two issues in the story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. I read the story aloud to an illiterate Canela man who had never heard the story before. The consultant said, “Ask him to retell the story.” Our helper retold the story, dramatizing every action, even falling off his chair. The consultant said, “Wow, he is an excellent storyteller; it’s easy to see he got it. Now ask him why Saul went blind.”
I did, and our helper said, “Oh, he fell to the ground and banged his head on a rock, which blinded him.” I interpreted this for the consultant and added, “But I don’t have a rock in my translation.” When I asked him about the rock, he said, “Oh, the same thing happened to my brother. He tripped over a log and hit his head on a rock, and it blinded him for several days.”
So, I had to add “God blinded him.” Readers will tend to interpret what is unclear in the light of their own experiences and cultural background.
When the consultant and I checked out the section on how Saul regained his sight, the Canela helper’s answer did not surprise me: “He fasted for three days and regained his sight.” That is because it is exactly what the Canela people do when they are hurt or sick. They stop eating for several days, and usually the problem clears up. So I had to add the real reason why he fasted: “He felt so sorry for persecuting Jesus’ followers, he punished himself by going hungry for three days.”
Sometimes translators must add, and sometimes they must subtract or substitute. The entire last blog post was about why Mark, Luke, and John substituted “kingdom of heaven” with “kingdom of God” and why Matthew continued to use the term “kingdom of heaven”.
When we translated Matt. 24:41, Jesus’ prediction of his return, “Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left,” we could picture one woman turning the circular stone and the other dropping the grain to be ground into the center of the top stone, but to the Canela people, it would mean nothing.
Canela women have never ground corn or other grains with a millstone, but they do use
Little girls learning to pound rice.
a mortar and pestle system. They use a hollowed-out hardwood tree stump as the mortar to hold the hulled rice. Two women take turns, each using a hardwood pestle to pound the hulled rice rhythmically, removing the hulls. In the harvest season, the constant Thunk! Thonk! Thunk! Thonk! resounds from many houses throughout the village.
Yes, we subtracted what Jesus actually said two thousand years ago to women in Palestine, but we added or substituted words so that now He is speaking to Canela women in Brazil, and this time even the audio illustrates his point; Thunk! Thonk! Thunk! Thonk! Thunk! . . . . Thunk, . . . . Hey, where did she go?
C.S. Lewis advises authors to close the gates and eliminate distractions in their writing. He illustrates this with a shepherd leading a flock of sheep along a path. The shepherd needs to shut every open gate along the sides of the path, since some sheep will tend to go through the open gate and stray from the flock. In our translation into Canela, each word we subtracted and explanation we added was a gate closer.