This post is not specifically about
Bible translation, but more generally about the concepts behind the
words we use.
In Monkolé it seems as if there is a
word for "hill", "geete", and a word for
"mountain", "iri kuta" (literally "head/top
[of] stone"). However, the ideas behind the words are not
necessarily the same as they are in English or French. I knew this already, but it was illustrated
well in a conversation we had recently as we were working on
translating 1 Samuel.
We came across the expression "was
hiding in the mountains", and Philémon, the youngest of our
team, looked slightly perplexed and said, "Hiding inside a cave
or something, then."
"Not necessarily," I said.
He looked even more confused and said,
"But if someone was just on a mountain, you'd see them straight
away."
I realised that he was applying his
idea of a mountain – shown here in a photo of a local "mountain":
Pastor Samuel, the older translator,
said to him, "Oh no, what we have here aren't really mountains.
In other countries they can be much much bigger."
"Yes, but still!" Philémon
answered, and I realised he was just making the mountain five or ten
times bigger in his mind.
This is when I am glad I have most of
our photos on my computer. I found him this photo I'd taken in 2005
of Grenoble and the mountains beyond. I could almost see Philémon's
understanding being widened as he answered, "Ah, ok, I
understand now!"
While this was not a Bible translation
problem as such, it does illustrate the way that any language tends
only to describe what it needs to describe in the lives of the people
who speak it. The Monkolé language has never needed to describe
anything more than small hills … and this is the kind of difficulty
we often come up against as we attempt to communicate the Biblical
text faithfully. Recently we have been wrestling with the concept of
"concubines". While polygamy is a way of life here, the
idea of having full wives and then "second-rank wives" is
totally foreign, and we still aren't entirely sure how to handle it.
