making a mountain out of a molehill?

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.