Month: June 2020

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Revitalized

I have written several times that translation committees are key to the success of translation in Africa. Have good translators is also important, of course. A translation committee is a group of carefully selected volunteers from the language community who oversee the work of the translators including setting goals, raising funds, creating awareness and organizing the sale and distribution of the translation. How well the committee does its job can affect how well the translation is accepted and how widely it is distributed and read. If it does not work well, some churches might just refuse to use translation, sticking with English or a regional language.

Siwu committee with regional translation coordinator

The translation into the Siwu language in Ghana’s Volta Region had a very dynamic and well-known translator who raised a lot of awareness for the translation and promoted it. When he fell ill and passed away, the translation committee knew that it would have to pick up the slack. Michael Serchie, the regional translation coordinator (center front) helped the community update the committee and revitalize it.

Michael is serving translation programs in more than a dozen languages. But even his wise and dynamic leadership is not enough if the language communities themselves are not interested enough to get involved. Sometimes, it takes a dramatic turn of events to get things moving. Michael saw that was happening and jumped in.

Pray for the translation in Siwu, and for the committee that they would work hard to see it widely used and distributed.

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So close

“This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not beyond your reach.It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it. – Deuteronomy 30:11-14

For some, the Bible is inaccessible. It is strange, foreign and impenetrable. The thing is, God never meant for it to be any of those things. In fact, the verses cited above tell us that it was not like that when God gave it. Instead, it was “very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart”. So what happened?

Lots of things happened. Some promoted the idea that the Bible should be limited to certain “holy” languages. Others prefered to keep the Bible in archaic language. Still others promoted the idea that one needs special training and knowledge to understand it. Finally, some of us don’t read the Bible enough to have any hope of getting comfortable with it.

We went all the way to Africa to help translate the Bible to bring it close to Africans. It would be tragic if it became more distant back in our home country.
Here are some suggestions for bringing it close.

  • Read a modern translation
  • Read it as a letter from God, not as a theological text.
  • Read the historical books as stories of real people rather than trying to find spiritual lessons everywhere.
  • Read several chapters at a time.
  • Read a chronological Bible.
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Language is impossible

Noam Chomsky is arguably the world’s greatest linguist. He has done more to advance our understanding of human language than anyone alive today. He contends that the greatest challenge to understanding language is understanding its infinite creativity.

Knowing a language, says Chomsky, means being able to produce an infinite number of sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before.

It is a fact that you say sentences you have never said before with regularity. A surprising number of them have never been said before by anyone. Yet the people around you mostly understand when you say something never said before. That’s rather astounding, if you think about it.

I use this feature of language when I read to my granddaughter. To spice things up, I stop and ask her crazy questions. If there’s a bear in the story, I might ask: “Is the bear going to come in the house and climb in the freezer and go to sleep?” Even though she’s only 4, she immediately understands this question she’s never been asked before. I’ll bet no one has ever asked you that question. Yet you understand it. My granddaughter will simply answer no, or say I’m being silly, or tell me no more questions, just read the story. The never-asked-before question doesn’t throw off her 4-year-old brain, not even a teeny, tiny bit. (That last sentence has probably never been written before.)

Knowing a language means being able to produce an infinite number of sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before.

We take the God-given and breathtaking creativity of language in stride. We don’t even notice it. But those working on artificial intelligence (AI) notice because it’s a huge problem for them. To be realistic, a robot would have to regularly produce never-said-before sentences and understand them when others said them.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. AI won’t reach that level, ever. Well, at least not for a very long time and certainly not without a revolution in computer technology. I’ll make a shorter term prediction. No publisher will use computer translation for its best selling novels in any of our lifetimes. The human translators they hire will use computers to help them. AI isn’t even close to good enough to translate artistic or elegant prose, let alone poetry.

God is the ultimate creator, but he gave us some of his ability to create. Everyday, you exercise that creativity effortlessly when you speak. Every person does, even the uneducated and illiterate. In fact, we can’t stop being creative with language. That’s one part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

Source: unknown

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God’s agent(s)

The big religious question in the West is whether God exists. But that is not the issue in Africa. Everyone knows that God exists. An Akan proverb says that you do not need to show God to a child. By this proverb, the Akan people mean:

God is everywhere and we can know him through his creation which even children can see. Hence, even children don’t need anybody to point out that there is a creator (obooadee) who is the Supreme Being. This is a pervasive Akan world view that is so strongly held that it is the rare Akan who does not believe in God. Saying that even children do not need anybody to tell them that God exists suggests that it is foolish for an adult to claim He doesn’t.

But the belief in an almighty Supreme Being who created all we see is not the end of theological questions. Quite the contrary. Many African cultures believe that God has withdrawn. He is no longer directly involved with the world but is instead like an absentee landlord. The theological question of importance, then, is not whether God exists but rather whether he is to be invoked directly (the Christian teaching) or instead contacted through his agents who act on his behalf (traditional African teaching). God’s agents include various spirits and ancestors who are actually running things in God’s place, according to traditional beliefs.

The traditional teaching has a strong foothold. A Ghanaian friend told me that his uncle was an upstanding member of a prominent church, yet he also did traditional religious sacrifices. His uncle explained that he was covering all the bases just in case. His case is hardly unique.

Unintentionally, the missionaries who first translated the Bible into Akan reinforced the traditional view. Finding no plural for God, they invented one. The history of translation is littered with disasters where translators invented words where one supposedly did not exist. The invented plural “gods” in Akan is one such disaster. Had the translators used the plural for lesser divinities (abosom) Christians would probably have learned not to go to these lesser divinities instead of going directly to God.

In any case, defending the existence of God is useless in most of Africa because it is answering a question people don’t ask; wouldn’t even think to ask. It would be more faithful to the Bible to talk about the role, or lack of role, for God’s agents, a question we in the West don’t ask much.