Last week the translation
team was joined by our translation consultant, Pastor Pierre
Barassounon, to continue checking the book of Exodus. It was slow
going, as we checked Exodus 19-30 (working from Tuesday morning until
Friday lunchtime) and it is full of detailed laws and descriptions of
the plan of the tabernacle.
What was very interesting
was to hear the translators' reactions to some of the laws. For
myself as an urban Westerner, laws about goring bulls, field boundary
markers and suchlike don't have much practical application. I can see
the point of them, but the ideas remain very abstract. We read things
like,
“If a bull gores someone
and that person dies, the bull shall be stoned to death, and even his
meat shall not be eaten. The owner shall not be punished further. But
if the bull had already gored someone, and the owner had been told
yet had done nothing about it, the bull shall be stoned and the owner
too shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:28,29 my own translation
back from our Monkolé version)
The translators' reaction
was, “Wow, imagine if that was the law here, it would make people
more careful about their bulls!” and they told the story of a bull
in a nearby village which was dangerous and yet the owner, despite
being warned, did nothing about it. Apparently some children, seeing
that nothing was going to be done, took the law into their own hands
and hamstrung the animal!
Laws on land rights are
also very relevant – just looking out of the translation office
window beyond the mission property we see fields which are currently
being fought over in court.
When we got onto the
tabernacle furnishings the challenge was to translate as accurately
as possible when the language doesn't necessarily have exact
equivalents. For example, the hangings are to be made of “blue,
purple and crimson linen” … or in some translations “violet,
purple and scarlet” … not so easy when Monkolé only has a
limited range of colour words. We ended up having to say “blue, red
and blue mixed with red”.
While progress was slow,
there was an encouraging feeling of teamwork and mutual commitment to
our task. I felt that I learned some new things about the Monkolé
culture, and we all learnt things from God's word, having pored over
it in detail for so many hours.
The team at work:
(Left-right, Samuel, Pierre, myself and Philémon)
And a big thanks to my
lovely husband who took on extra childcare duties that week to free
up my time!
