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
