Month: July 2019

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Too literate

Literacy class (photo: GILLBT, Rodney Ballard)

Those of you who follow this blog know that I write frequently about the impact of adult literacy in northern Ghana. Ever since I arrived in Ghana in 2010, I have heard all sorts of Ghanaians (farmers, doctors, pastors, clerks, doctors, and more) extoll the positive impact of adult literacy in northern Ghana. It is credited with effects as diverse as the spread of the Gospel, better opportunies for women, better education outcomes for schoolchildren, less conflict, and increased income. Many people who live in places where it has had great effects have pleaded for a resumption of the widespread literacy programs which were run in the 1990s.

It was way back in the early 1800s that widespread reading revolutionized the United States. For example, by 1822, more Americans read newspapers than anyone else. There were hundreds of newspapers with the largest having a circulation of about 4,000 readers. And the number of readers kept growing. From 1832 to 1836, the circulation of daily papers in New York City exploded from 18,000 to about 60,000. At that time the city’s population was less than 300,000, so one paper was sold for every five people – probably about one per family. Americans became the most literate people not just in the world but also in history.

Young woman in literacy class in Burkina Faso

We have been so literate for so long that we have forgotten what it is like to live in a pre-literate society; where key information is only available to you by word of mouth from someone who got it the same way, where you can’t track down the original source to verify the information, where you can’t read the Bible for yourself, where there are only a few people who can tell you what the Bible says and you might not know any of them, and where you can’t jot down a piece of information you will need later. I could go on and on.

Wycliffe and other translation agencies say that it is difficult to raise money for adult literacy. That’s probably the case, at least in part, because we are so literate that we can’t imagine the lives of those who can’t read and therefore we can’t imagine the benefits.

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Efficiency’s limits

Efficiency is a mark of good missions and good charities. They use their money well. In biblical terms, they are good stewards of their resources. They take pains to measure their efficiency. A homeless shelter will count the number of people who use it. A mission doing Bible translation will count the number of languages into which it translates the Bible. A single translation program will track how many verses and books have been translated.

While efficiency is good, it is not nearly enough. For example, an addiction treatment center needs to track how many of its patients recover, not just how many go through the program. It is no good for it to say that it’s program is less expensive if few of its patients stay clean. That’s a waste of money too. Efficiency is no good without effectiveness.

It is good that we translate the Bible into more and more languages. I have always tried to make translation go faster and cost less. But more translations done faster and for less money must take second place to doing things so that those translated Bibles transform the communities for whom they were done.

The biggest factor determining whether a translation will be read and have impact is also the most difficult to influence – the attitudes of the people and their leaders toward the language. One study found that if church and mission leaders support the translation effort it will have wide impact, but if not people probably won’t ever even read it. The reasons why leaders and people might not favor a translation are so many and varied that can’t list them all, so here’s one example.

People might think that the language is defective or not unholy, as some Jamaicans believe about the Jamaican language, also known as Patois. This is not as uncommon as you might think. In the 14th and 15th centuries some people believed that English was not worthy of a translation.

In any case, there is no sense doing a translation into a language people think defective unless you are willing to put time and money into an effort to change those attitudes. We have a less serious version of this issue in Ghana where some church leaders and pastors think that translation into Ghanaian languages is quaint and useless, even though people at the grassroots support it. So the Ghanaian organization I work for focuses communication showing the benefits on the leaders. It’s working.

Writing the language in a way that is easier to read makes impact more likely

In other cases, efficiency and effectiveness align. Doing a translation faster, for example, generally results in people looking on the translations with favor. I have seen translation programs advance so slowly that people started making fun of them.

In general, the Ghanaians I work with are more concerned about effectiveness than are Westerners like me. While Westerners are more focused on efficiency. This sometimes results in tensions between the Ghanaians I work with and Westerners who fund translation. The side with the money has the advantage, causing efficiency to sometimes get more attention than effectiveness.

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OT perseverance

Woman drying calabashes to sell. Photo: Rodney Ballard, Wycliffe Global Alliance

Once the New Testament was completed in many languages in Ghana, translation stopped. Actually, it only sort-of stopped. It stopped officially. Missionaries or Ghanaians who had come from other parts of the world or of Ghana to translate the New Testament moved on to other things. Salaries stopped for the national translators. So they went back to their other activities such as pastoring, farming or running small businesses. But the translators never really stopped translating. They had to live and take care of their families, so they couldn’t translate full-time.

Regional translation coordinator, Michael Serchie, addresses a church in the Volta Region. Photo: Rodney Ballard, Wycliffe Global Alliance

But they kept at the translation in their free time, working slowly but surely. There was no money for them to attend translation workshops where they would gain additional skills and information needed to translate certain passages or books. But sometimes money was found here or there and they were able to attend. They worked using old computers and got stalled when those computers broke down. . The crucial step of having each translation checked verse-by-verse by a translation expert was scheduled when it was possible to do it without spending much, and sometimes without spending anything. But translated passages and books sat on the translators’ desks for a long time waiting for that crucial step. Even if the translations were checked, publishing was impossibly expensive for the poorer communities. Meanwhile, churches, pastors, Christians and even sometimes community members who are not Christians were asking that the translation resume as before.

It is quite obvious that the translators and the language communities want the Old Testament in their languages. They want it to move forward rapidly, but if there are not the resources needed to make that happen, then they will push it forward at whatever speed they can with the resources they have. Unfortunately, that is quite a slow pace. It will take decades to complete Old Testament. In some cases, decades have passed already and only a small portion of the Old Testament is ready to publish.

I have written several articles on why translating the Old Testament is important. The perseverance of Ghanaians in translating the Old Testament gives us another window into why. Would they work so hard without pay and for so long for something they thought was of no use? Would their churches and fellow believers keep asking and encouraging? It seems foolishness to me to think that their persistence is mistaken. They really do need the Old Testament.