why?

I am sometimes asked, respectfully, whether it is really necessary to translate the Bible into local languages when "most people" speak French. After all, if sermons can be translated on-the-spot, couldn't the same be done with the Bible?

My first answer to this is actually a question. Do you understand everything you read in the Bible when you read it in your mother tongue? I suspect the answer to this will be no, or else you are avoiding the bits you don't like! And if the answer is no, then why add a layer of difficulty for Bible readers by demanding that they read it in their second language?

My second, and similar, answer comes from my experience as a member of a Bible translation team. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues on the team, and if you spoke with them in French you would find them competent speakers. But that is very different from understanding the nuances, rhetoric and irony of a literary text in another language. Some of the drafts we've worked on (and it may have been previous translators who originally translated them) read like they've been translated by a computer. The vocabulary seems about right, but the meaning is garbled.

So that is why I think it is important that people have the Bible in their own language. If nothing else, if they don't understand the text, it is important that they know that it is the text itself which is difficult to understand. If they suspect that it is their own lack of fluency in their second language which is a preventing them from understanding God's word, it discourages them from even trying.

As an example of mis-use of a second language, the youth of our church, who are educated in French, recently made themselves a T-shirt exhorting others to "Sois un modèle à égard." Not only is this a misquote of the Bible (probably based on I Tim. 4:12 or Titus 2:6-7) it is bad French which you would have thought someone would have noticed before getting however many tens of T-shirts printed. It does make you wonder whether they actually understand the sentence, or at least more than the first three words. Often when reading in another language, we are convinced we understand, but our understanding is based on assumptions and expectations rather than the actual words (this happens too of course, though to a lesser extent, in our first language).

And a quotation which has another take on the question:

The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner. —William Cameron Townsend