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If you have been following our ministry for any time, you have probably heard of Mami and Koo. They are a young couple that came to the Lord a few years back, and immediately bore a lot of fruit. They were married (something that doesn’t happen very often). They sought discipleship and even leadership in the church. One recent joy is that Koo and Mami have started teaching Sunday School. We are super encouraged about the content of their teaching. In Cameroon, teachers mainly impart information through rote memory drills and often do not aim for comprehension. Even worse, the…

Near the end of our time in seminary, when we had first decided to pursue Bible translation, I remember having a conversation in class about translating a Greek word. The Greek word was a familial term that referred to a group of Christians of both genders. Some translations translate this word into English as “brothers,” others as “brothers and sisters,” still others as “brethren.” In class, I argued that since there was an English word that had the same meaning as the Greek, we should just translate it as “brethren.” At the time, I had spent 4 years getting a…

This will be my last post on translation theory for a while. Generally speaking, there are four qualities that we strive after for a good translation: accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and acceptability. So far, I have already talked about accuracy and clarity. For this post I will discuss naturalness and acceptability. Naturalness One of the targets of translation is that the translation would be natural in the receptor language. This is perhaps one of the simplest targets and also one that is the most difficult to achieve. My experience has been that if you hand a bilingual person a text and…

I have tried in the last few posts to explain some of the characteristics of a good translation. To build up to accuracy, I also discussed the meaning of words, explication, and audience. Another of the characteristics of a good translation is known as clarity. Clarity is a value in Bible translation, in part, because historically Protestants have believed that the Scriptures are understandable. The Reformers referred to the issue not as clarity, but as perspicuity (a word we don’t usually use now because…it’s not easy to understand). The word perspicuity means “the quality of being clear and easy to…

This is the fourth blog post responding to the recent post by my friend Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? Here are links to those posts with some important takeaways: This leads me to my definition of accuracy: A translation is accurate when the original message is communicated to a new audience. No meaning should be added, removed, or changed in the translation. If I understood his position well, I think Aaron would identify my definition with communicative accuracy, something that he believes is more akin to clarity. On the website I just linked to, you will…

This is the third part of a series on translation responding to a recent post by Aaron Shryock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation? It probably would be helpful to read the other two posts first: On Meaning and On Audience, but here are some major takeaways from those two posts: With this background in mind, I would like to discuss something that Aaron mentions in his post, which is what translators call “explication.” Explicit and Implicit Information In order to understand explication you have to first understand that in human communication, we always say less than we mean….

In my last post (On Meaning) I began the build up to responding to a post by my friend Aaron Shryock regarding accuracy in Bible translation. In that post I made a claim that “while meaning in the source text can be discovered apart from the audience, meaning in the receptor language is very audience-dependant.” For context, when translating we take a source text (in our case, the Bible) and translate that text into a receptor language (Kwakum). In this post, I want to explain how meaning can be audience-dependant. Meaning in the Source Text is not Audience-Dependant First, I…

I recently read a post by a friend of mine, Aaron Shyrock called What is Accuracy in Bible Translation?. I want to address some of the concerns that Aaron brought up in regards to accuracy, but I felt that it was first necessary to discuss the meaning of “meaning.” A while ago I wrote a blog that made the claim that all Translation is Meaning-Based. Check out that post if you want to see what I mean by that. As far as I know, Aaron would not disagree with this idea. When we translate (the Bible or anything else) we…

We have been dealing with a lot of issues on our translation team recently. Amidst deaths and funerals and the daily difficulties, we recently had to let one of our translators go because of sexual immorality. Another confessed that he had nearly fallen into the same sin. We spent an entire week just thinking through the Christian response to sin, and how we can seek righteousness. In our discussions, we tread that fine line between demanding righteousness and recognizing weakness/offering grace. Because of a small view of sexual sin, our actions to remove a translator seemed to some to be…

A few years ago, when we still had young kids, we hired a young Kwakum woman to come and help us with cooking and cleaning in our home. She came to us one day and said that she wouldn’t be able to work for a week because one of her family members had died. The reason she wanted a week off was that the Kwakum have funeral celebrations that last for six days. They spend all six days at the burial site, they sleep next to the tomb, and they spend all that time with their family. So, attending this…