I was with some Ghanaian colleagues presenting Bible translation at a Christian College in Accra. After the presentation, the dean of the college was taking an offering. He told the students “Let the red reduce”. This sentence is an example of implicit information. When something someone says or writes relies on information that is not directly expressed in what they said or wrote, then the meaning of their words depends on implicit information. In this case, the implicit information is behind the word “red”. Here’s how. The money of many countries has different colored bills for different denominations. Ghana is one of them.

Here are the bills, so that you can interpret the dean’s comments for yourself.

Just like all language, the Bible also contains passages that imply information that is not found in the words themselves like this one:

But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and down in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country; And sounded, and found it twenty fathoms: and when they had gone a little further, they sounded again, and found it fifteen fathoms. Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day. (Acts 27 ESV)

The fact that the water was getting rapidly shallower confirmed that they were approaching land, but the text does not state this obvious fact. Approaching the land at night is dangerous, but the passage doesn’t say that either, although it does say that the sailors are concerned about shipwreck and take action – they drop anchors. The anchors are designed to stop or slow the ship, another piece of obvious and therefore implied information.

What if you were translating for a landlocked people who had never seen the ocean and had no lakes? Would they know that the decreasing depth of the water meant land was approaching, that this was dangerous and that dropping anchors would slow the ship and help prevent disaster? For them, this passage might be as obscure as “Let the red reduce” was for most of you.

The Dean also said, “Give me brown, I will smile.”The Dean’s comments are analogous to an American preacher encouraging people to put fewer Georges in the offering and to even throw in some Bens.

By the way, we used to use the Acts 27 shipwreck passage in seminars on advanced translation principles in Burkina Faso – a landlocked country where most people have not seen an ocean or a lake large enough to navigate with a ship.