TORONTO, Canada, May 11, 2005 — With a few deft keystrokes and clicks of his mouse, "Mr. Le" (he asked that his full name not be used) can read about God cleaving day from night in Hebrew, English and his native Vietnamese, the texts arranged in three neat vertical columns on his laptop's screen.
Complementing the verse from the first chapter of Genesis is a palette of icons from which he can summon dictionaries, scripture commentaries, glossing tools and other instruments that once cluttered the desks of those who toil to understand the ancient words in their own tongue.
Alas, the last translation of the Bible into Vietnamese was completed in 1926. "We should do a new one," Le says with a smile. "There is a need for it."
Over in the Africa "section" of the room, Martin Ntambo of Malawi and Ayo Durodola of Nigeria cradle their chins as they scroll through a New Testament verse. There are more than 400 languages spoken in Nigeria, Durodola points out, and the Bible is available in just 17 of them. "Not enough," he pronounces.
Supply for the global demand is the main reason these and about 25 other "digital servants," as they're called, and Bible translation experts from a dozen countries gathered in rural Ontario this month.
For 12 days in a Mennonite summer camp outside Stratford, hosted by the Canadian Bible Society and its Institute for Computer Assisted Publishing (ICAP), they honed their skills in a magical bit of software called Paratext, which the Bible Society helped develop and distributes worldwide.
The program not only provides access to biblical texts in the original Hebrew and Greek and permits users to create databases in dozens of target languages, but allows onscreen editing, analysis, explanatory notes and overall quality assurance. Most important, it provides what those in the Bible translation business call a smooth path to publishing - the last step before a clean copy of the Good Book can be read by the faithful around the world.
Time was when Bible translators laboured to and from handwritten documents. Later, in typing and retyping, sometimes dozens of times, errors were introduced at each stage. Often, political turmoil or human sloppiness caused the loss of manuscripts. "It was a nightmare," says Hart Wiens, director of scripture translation for the Bible Society.
TORONTO, Canada, May 11, 2005 — With a few deft keystrokes and clicks of his mouse, "Mr. Le" (he asked that his full name not be used) can read about God cleaving day from night in Hebrew, English and his native Vietnamese, the texts arranged in three neat vertical columns on his laptop's screen.
Complementing the verse from the first chapter of Genesis is a palette of icons from which he can summon dictionaries, scripture commentaries, glossing tools and other instruments that once cluttered the desks of those who toil to understand the ancient words in their own tongue.
Alas, the last translation of the Bible into Vietnamese was completed in 1926. "We should do a new one," Le says with a smile. "There is a need for it."
Over in the Africa "section" of the room, Martin Ntambo of Malawi and Ayo Durodola of Nigeria cradle their chins as they scroll through a New Testament verse. There are more than 400 languages spoken in Nigeria, Durodola points out, and the Bible is available in just 17 of them. "Not enough," he pronounces.
Supply for the global demand is the main reason these and about 25 other "digital servants," as they're called, and Bible translation experts from a dozen countries gathered in rural Ontario this month.
For 12 days in a Mennonite summer camp outside Stratford, hosted by the Canadian Bible Society and its Institute for Computer Assisted Publishing (ICAP), they honed their skills in a magical bit of software called Paratext, which the Bible Society helped develop and distributes worldwide.
The program not only provides access to biblical texts in the original Hebrew and Greek and permits users to create databases in dozens of target languages, but allows onscreen editing, analysis, explanatory notes and overall quality assurance. Most important, it provides what those in the Bible translation business call a smooth path to publishing - the last step before a clean copy of the Good Book can be read by the faithful around the world.
Time was when Bible translators laboured to and from handwritten documents. Later, in typing and retyping, sometimes dozens of times, errors were introduced at each stage. Often, political turmoil or human sloppiness caused the loss of manuscripts. "It was a nightmare," says Hart Wiens, director of scripture translation for the Bible Society.
PHOTO: Canadian Bible Society
Much of the learning at the ICAP seminar happened in smaller groups arranged either by region or topic of interest.
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"The hope for the computer was that it would preserve the text and make it very easy to edit," Wiens explains. Still, the "greatest danger" takes place in the process of handing off a text from a translation team to the publisher. "All kinds of unexpected and unwanted things might happen."
The ultimate goal of Paratext, then, is to move seamlessly from translation to typesetting to page layout to publishing.
What would John Wycliffe have made of deploying all these bytes and megahertz? The 14th century Oxford theologian broke ranks with the religious establishment of the day when he had the audacity to translate the Bible from Latin into English. God's words, he believed, were for everyone. The infuriated Pope thought otherwise, and a full 44 years after Wycliffe died, ordered the translator's bones dug up, crushed, burned and scattered in a river.
It took another 183 years before the King James Bible - for centuries considered the gold standard - made its debut, a task that took 47 men 11 years to complete.
Today, the Bible is by far the most translated work. It's available, in whole or part, in 2,285 languages. The Bible Society says there's a recognized need for translation into at least half of the 4,000 languages in which no book of the Bible exists.
But the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments, exists in just 350 or so languages. There are only 70 qualified people who act as translators and biblical experts overseeing 700 projects, mostly in Asia and Africa.
Officials of the umbrella United Bible Societies, which brings together Bible societies and offices in more than 200 countries, lament a "serious shortage" of qualified translators and experts in Unicode, the software that encodes languages using non-Roman script.
But Wiens is quick to point out that the job of translating the Bible is still left mostly to the human brain. A computer's involvement, though invaluable, is limited to the technical.
For example, if an operator is stumped on a passage in a target language, Paratext will compare the Hebrew or Greek source text with a translated version, and purely on the basis of statistical probabilities, will suggest what equivalent words may be used. If a translator is working from, say, an English source text, the completed work is translated back into English. These "back translations" are then checked against the original Hebrew or Greek.
"Accuracy is always checked against the original," Wiens says.
It's left to people to overcome the many linguistic and cultural stumbling blocks in translations. One of Wiens' favourite examples is the conundrum of rendering the fig, olive and palm trees of the Bible's arid landscape into languages spoken in Arctic regions, such as Inuktitut (in which a Bible was completed in 2002 after 23 years of work).
"They have one generic term for tree," he says of Canada's Inuit. "It's the same with many animals in the Bible. So we have to start with a base word and tweak it." Or explain it in a glossary at the back of the translation.
Another difficulty is whether nouns are masculine or feminine, as in French and Spanish, or whether they are animate or inanimate, as in many aboriginal tongues.
Gender-inclusive language and use of such pronouns as "he" and "she" is another big issue, but not for everyone. The African language Yoruba, for instance, is gender neutral. Asked how translators work around the many references to "he," "his" and "they" in the Gospel accounts, Nigeria's Durodola shrugs. "It's not a big issue," he says.
Sometimes, the simplest English words reveal the frustrating shortcomings of other languages: "Love," "believe," "give," (as in "God gave his only Son") even "God." Rather than simply transliterating the latter and mimicking the sounds the letters make, translators aim for local flavour.
Durodola and Vietnam's Le smile at each other on discovering that their words for the supreme deity have the same meaning: "Duc Chua Troi" in Vietnamese and "Olorun" in Yoruba both mean, roughly, "Lord of the Sky."
And while the blood of Jesus is a clear enough metaphor in English, in other languages it has to be rendered as representing a sacrificial death.
It is consistency that is sought, explains Kuo-Wei Peng, a Bible scholar and translator from Taiwan.
"If the original says 'milk and honey,' keep it that way," he tells an informal workshop. "But also keep it if it's 'Jesus Christ' and then 'Christ Jesus.' "
Ultimately, translators work toward conveying the Bible's overall intent rather than its literal meaning. "We say the translated text should be as clear as if it was written in that language," says Wiens. "We seek to bring the text to the reader and the reader to the text."
They also seek new Christians. These translators and computer mavens have a distinctly evangelical zeal to spread the Gospels. But Bible translations, they say, also promote literacy.
"I think we can say with confidence that nothing has contributed more to the spread of literacy around the world than the availability of scriptures because in many cases, that's people's primary motivation for learning to read," Wiens notes.
They're good for bolstering self-worth too. "When people see the Bible in their native language, they say, 'Wow, our language is as useful as any.' "
Wiens, who "functions at some level" in eight languages, himself discovered the feeling two years when he read the first-ever translation of the Bible into his native Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German.
"Now, we read the Bible in Plautdietsch - and wow!"
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