If you’re anything like me, you may regularly look up Scripture in more than one English translation, perhaps to get a fresh take on an otherwise familiar text, or maybe when a word in our most trusted English Bible seems strange or difficult to understand and we want to verify it in another trusted translation.
We who can read our Bibles in English are blessed with a variety of translations — many of them with very high quality standards — far beyond what readers of any other language can access. In fact, there are about 900 different translations of the whole or part of the Bible in English alone.
Even this avalanche of translations has a limitation, though, one that new translations still won’t be able to solve: these English translations are bound to the inherent constraints of our language — English.
Jost Zetzsche
If you have studied other languages — or if you’ve simply been exposed to other forms or dialects of English — you know there can be ways to express a certain reality, idea or feeling in one form of language that just isn’t readily available in another form of language. For example, as a parent, the British English term “dummy” felt much more appropriate and meaningful than the American English “pacifier.”
To be sure, anything can be translated, but sometimes a translation might read more like a description of that one word or one phrase, and sometimes it’s the opposite: a word or phrase might be expressed much more pointedly in a translation than in the original text, often even in a way that adds another layer of meaning altogether — such as the translation of the slightly bewildering “removing of the roof” of the friends of the paralytic man in Mark 2. In Avaric, a language in the Russian Caucasus, that was a one-term concept that the people were completely familiar with, so no bewilderment there.
I’m a translator, which makes me a professional student of these strange and sometimes almost mysterious relationships between languages that allow speakers and readers of different languages to have new and nuanced insights into a text. I’ve also long cherished reading the Bible in many versions that are accessible to me in languages I’m familiar with.
An idea for a Bible comprehension tool
Those dual passions made me wonder if it just might be possible to build a tool that would allow me and others to also “read” Bibles in languages we don’t understand, especially in cases where these other languages have a richer, deeper or sometimes just slightly unusual understanding of the text.
Every Bible translation starts with a source text that determines the content to be translated, but it’s the translator’s or translation team’s understanding expressed through another language that then becomes God’s word for the speakers of that language. Why wouldn’t we want to participate in that? Why wouldn’t we want to expand the number of accessible translated languages from one, two or three to 3,500 — the number of languages into which at least a part of the Bible has been translated?
United Bible Societies agreed, knowing a tool like this also would be highly valuable for the many teams around the world who continue their work on new Bible translations.
Naturally, a collection like this is not created by opening a faucet and letting the data to simply flow out; instead, it’s a long and ongoing manual process of finding — and often pleading for — information that can be made understandable in English and then put into a framework for users to find the data quickly.
Enter the Translation Insights and Perspectives tool (known as TIPs) at tips.translation.bible. Although the current data in this collection is only a fraction of what will be available in years to come, we now have data for almost 1,000 languages and a total of about 60,000 records, some of which are so extensive they individually would fill many printed pages. (As an example, look up the entry for YHWH).
Look up any verse in the Bible and you will find examples of how the ideas expressed there are conveyed in other languages and other idioms.
An example
While TIPs contains many fascinating illustrations of how languages force translators to look at the biblical text more closely and, in turn, reveal new insights to us, let’s consider one recently found example: In English as well as in the original Hebrew, there is only one kind of first-person plural pronoun (“we/us/our”). Since English speakers may have been exposed only to that specific grammatical rule, we may assume other languages use the same system, when in reality there’s a whole range of possibilities.
Bura, for instance, a language spoken by half a million people in Nigeria, has three words for “we” — an exclusive form (referring to the speaker and others but excluding the person who is communicated to), an inclusive “dual” form (referring to the speaker and one person), and an inclusive “plural” form (referring to the speaker and more than one person who is communicated to). By the way, if you imagine that this grammatical feature called “clusivity” is a rather rare and eccentric feature, the speakers of a whopping 34% of the world’s 7,000-plus languages would disagree, since they all have some form of this differentiation.
One place this differentiation occurs is in the translation of the plural pronoun in phrases uttered by God and translated into English as “let us make,” “become like one of us,” or “let us go down” in Genesis 1:26, Genesis 3:22, and Genesis 11:7 respectively. For each instance, the Bura translation team had to choose which of the “we’s” should be used.
Here’s how one member of the translation team explains their choice:
God appears to refer to himself in the plural, and it seems important to retain this, even though we don’t know whether it is a reference to the Trinity (the Bura translation team’s view) or a hint at a polytheistic background or the ‘council of God’ (e.g. Psalm 82:1 et al.). We agreed to use the inclusive plural form, which allows for a Trinity, pantheon or divine council; the only interpretation it excludes is one which reads this as referring to just the Father and the Son (which some may think is the case).
This is an intriguing insight: When English speakers read these verses, we may tend to assume the pronoun is used as the “royal we” to emphasize the greatness of God (along the lines of the Hebrew Elohim, which also is the plural form and is translated as the singular “God” in English), or maybe as a way to describe some kind of deliberation in God’s mind. The Bura translators’ decision is helpful for us not because it provides us with a “correct” answer (it may or may not), but because it allows us entry into a conversation with other believers in a living and unique language expressing God’s word using the best resources available to them.
That’s not all
Other kinds of data we have been able to curate and share include:
- Many, many other enriched views on the biblical text via the texts of translated Bibles like the one above
- A very broad array of sociological views (such as culturally appropriate re-imaginations of what relationships between biblical characters looked like based on honorific concepts of the target culture or societal constructs in which age plays an important role, what counts as a disease and what role different body parts play in emotional or intellectual processes, concepts of modesty, gender roles and assignments)
- Ecological and environmental differences (relating to hygiene, fauna, flora, mineralogy, metallurgy)
- Different culture-based communicative approaches (translations that are most communicative in the form of song and/or dance in some cultures, translations in the form of icons, through art [specifically non-Western art and culturally agnostic art ] via stylistic elements like ideophones — words that function as sound effects in cartoons in English but are stylistically desired in some languages — or exalted literary styles reconstructing the poetry of the Hebrew text or celebrating the literary styles of the translated language)
- A new appreciation of sign languages and their meaning even to nonsigners
- (Mis-) perceptions that were shaped through translations of the past or the present
- Translation commentaries specifically created for translators for every verse of the New and Old Testaments as well as the deuterocanonical books that query the text in a linguistically deeper manner than most other commentaries
All the data has the same goal: to enable our users to encounter questions (and answers) about the text of the Bible they didn’t know existed and to enrich their own reading and understanding of Scripture.
I hope you’ll give TIPs a try. You’ll find it easy to use (just enter a verse you’re interested in and start scrolling), and you’ll also find that God’s church is very multilingual. And that’s something with great promise for all of us.
Jost Zetzsche is a translator and the curator of Translation Insights and Perspectives (tips.translation.bible) for United Bible Societies. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, YouVersion and BibleGateway.