Translation is simple isn’t it? Just a case of finding the right words in the new language to replace the words in the old language; nothing to it really!
Well, of course it isn’t as simple as that. Words combine into phrases which don’t quite up to the sum of the individual parts; has anyone ever really had a frog in their throat?
There are many complexities in translation; not least the fact that words change their meaning according to the context. Nataly Kelly, co-author of the excellent Found in Translation, has just posted an excellent blog post which explores the way in which some common English words have multiple senses according to the context in which we find them.
This infographic captures the issue wonderfully.
Though the example is from English, the same is actually true of every language, including Greek and Hebrew; the meaning of a word is determined by its context. This is why it is impossible to always translate a word or phrase in the Bible by the same word or phrase in English (or any other language for that matter). Languages just don’t work like that.
Jesus of Nazareth gives God’s loving mission a face, a voice, a pair of sandals. There would be no mission of the church without the mission of Jesus. The importance of Jesus’ own life and message forour mission in the world aught to go without saying. But historically the church has struggled with how its mission should relate to the ministry and teaching of Jesus. On the one hand, some Christian groups, like Francis of Assisi and his followers, have tried to imitate Jesus’ earthly example quite literally. Long before it became trendy to wear WWJD (“What would Jesus do?”) bracelets, Francis’s band tried to replicate Jesus’ wandering life of poverty and his loving service to the poor and the lepers. On the other hand, many Christians have focussed so much on the saving significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection that what Jesus actually said and did is assigned a back row seat. As a result, the church has often settled for simply offering a spiritual salvation to individuals, rather than announcing the dawning reign of God, which creates a new community and transforms every aspect of life.
The British press has been full of stories about immigration, recently. Depending on the newspaper you read, you may have discovered that immigrants threaten the social fabric of the UK or that they bring nothing but economic and cultural benefits. However, you would have struggled to find much about the way in which moving from one culture to another can have on the immigrant.
This song by Gilles Servat captures this side of things wonderfully. It is written from the perspective of a Breton going to live in Paris, but its significance is far wider than that. As someone who is interested in minority languages, I find verse four particularly moving.
I apologise in advance that my translation doesn’t really capture the power of the song. Feel free to correct it in the comments!
Est-ce par espérance
Ou est-ce par désespoir
Tu as quitté ta terre
Pour travailler ici
Maintenant tu découvres
Dans tes soirs de solitude
Sous le regard des autres
Que tu es différent
Refrain
Il est là, là, il est en toi, en toi, le pays
Et tu dis, c´est sur, je reviendrai,
Là-bas, si je peux,
Oui
Tu écoutes des musiques
Et des chansons de là-bas
Coeur serré tu les chantes
Sur ton lit dans le noir
La langue de ta mère
Elle ne t´intéressait pas
Maintenant tu veux l´apprendre
Tu n´as plus honte de toi
Refrain
Dans un bar tu retrouves
D´autres enfants de là-bas
Vous faites dans vos rêves
Un pays plus beau qu´il n´est.
Refrain
Was it hope, or was it despair, that made you leave your homeland, to come and find work here?
And now, in the lonely evenings and the glances of others, you discover that you are different.
Chorus: It is there, there inside you; there is your land. And you tell yourself that one day, you will go back if you can. Yes.
You listen to your music, the songs from back home. Lying on your bed, a lump in your throat, you sing them to yourself.
The language your mother taught you; you didn’t care about it. Now you want to learn to speak it; no longer ashamed of who you are.
Chorus
In a bar you meet up with some folks from back there. In conversation you recreate a land better than reality.
Chorus
If the video doesn’t show up, you can find the link here. If you liked the song, it comes from the album Zenith, which is ridiculously expensive on Amazon.
I’ll be the first to admit that I really don’t get the whole liturgical year thing and I struggle to see why advent is such a big deal. However, leaving aside my non-conformist-bah-humbug tendencies, today’s collect (above) for the first Sunday in Advent, did strike me as being odd.
Why would we pray to be made holy so that we can be ready to meet Jesus Christ?
I’m not against praying to be made holy; I need as much of that as I can get. But the thing is, it is only when we meet Christ that we can actually be made holy. The whole Christian message revolves around the notion that it is the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes us acceptable to God; nothing more and nothing less. If you haven’t already met Christ, you can’t turn from the darkness of sin to the light of holiness; end of story.
I suppose that I could be missing the point and this is a special prayer for extra holiness for the Christmas season, but this simply begs the question, why? What’s so special about this time of year that we need to be extra holy now? If we have to be extra holy at Christmas, does this mean that we can let standards slip once we get to epiphany?
It’s probably just me, but though this collect sounds lovely, I’m not sure it actually makes a lot of sense. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise by someone less liturgically challenged!
There are some people who don’t think that Karen Matheson is the greatest female singer in the world; they aren’t bad people, they just haven’t heard her yet.
But Capercaille are not simply a backing band for their wonderful vocalist. Indeed, last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Ms Matheson often sat quietly at the back of the stage, clapping her hands, as the rest of the band reeled, jigged and strathspeyed our socks off. The only problem was that this was a ‘no dancing’ venue. Even someone as terpsichorally challenged as me wanted to get off my seat and twirl around. They were simply stunning. Seven musicians at the top of their game.
However, it was the vocal numbers that really made the show. At its best, music gives a sense of ‘place’; it takes you to the place where it comes from. Listening to Karen Matheson singing, was as near to being on the West Coast of Scotland as it is possible to be while being in the South East of England. There were ballads, waulking songs and those clever Gaellic songs where the words tumble faster than the water over a waterfall. However, the highlight was the almost a cappella version of Fear a’ Bhàta which they used as an encore. It sent tingles down my spine and into my feet. It went something like this:
I've just spent a fascinating two days at Calvin Seminary at a conference on a missional reading of Scripture. I'll probably have a little more to say in later blog posts and I will certainly be linking to the talks when they go online. However, for the moment, Chris Wright summarised his talk on a missional reading of the Old Testament by saying that we need to ask these questions of any text we are studying.
What do we know of the context or origin of the text. What does it say about how God and his people engage in missional issues? Why was this text produced?
What does this text contribut to our understnding of God revealed in Scripture as a whole?
Where does this text fint in the whole Biblical story of the mission of God? What comes before and after it? How does it move the story along?
What sort of people are in the text or are envisaged by the text? Does the text link to the purposes of God in electing his people?
Does this text point in any way towards the future? What are the connections between this text and the broader eschatological vision?
What happens if you read this passage with Luke 24 (the Emmaus road discourse) in mind? What happens if you don't?
What questions to we want to address to this text in the light of our involvement in mission?
What questions does the text address to our practice of mission? What encouragements or critiques does it bring?
Chris gives a sustained example of this approach in his excellent book, The Mission of God.
On more than one occasion, I’ve questions whether the terms ‘missiology‘ or ‘mission of God‘ (even when written in Latin a missio Dei) are actually very useful terms. They are used in so many different ways that you are never quite sure what people mean by them.
In a recent article, Ed Stetzer highlights the evolution of the term ‘Misison of God’ and notes why some Evangelicals are reluctant to use it. This quote gets to the heart of the issue:
Johannes Hoekendijk and others, sought to define themissio dei as larger than the church. Their concern was that the mission of God was more than church extension–and they were partially right.
Hoekendijk challenged the member bodies in the World Council of Churches to abandon both the traditional form of church and the traditional approach to missions. He held that the congregations should abandon their buildings and institutions and become bands of roving ministers, believing that the time for evangelistic mission work had passed. This was called participating in the missio dei.
Because of this history, and much of the social justice emphasis (or “social gospel” depending on your view), evangelicals have historically shied away from missio deitheology. For example, there is this telling description in the Evangelical Dictionary of Missions under the heading, “Missio Dei”:
Hoekendijk challenged missionaries to identify and integrate with the suffering masses, seeking to realize God’s shalom on earth. As this occurred in the 1960′s and 70′s, the World Council’s ministry focused almost entirely on social, economic, and political “liberation.” Positively, the WCC reminded evangelicals that Jesus came feeding and healing as well as teaching and preaching. Evangelicals, especially the neo-evangelicals, admitted they had presented a “one-sided Gospel,” as Ron Sider put it. Unfortunately, the leaders in the World Council of Churches also advocated a “one-sided Gospel,” one that neglected humanity’s need for reconciliation with God.
If you want some further background to the term missio Dei, you could do worse than read my chapter in James Butare’s book International Development in Kingdom perspective. It’s now available as a pdf here.
I know that you have been waiting with baited breath for the annual Bible translation statistics and here they are!
The highlight figures are on the right taken from a brilliant infographic that you can download, print and share with others. If you prefer your statistics in text format, you can get hold of them here.
There is known active translation and/or linguistic development happening in 2,167 languages across approximately 131 countries potentially impacting 1.9 billion people. This includes 692 languages for which there is no known Scripture; 197 languages with a Bible; 645 languages with a New Testament; and 651 languages with portions of Scripture, such as a book. Staff from organisations in the Wycliffe Global Alliance are believed to be involved in at least 79% of these programmes.
If English is anything to go by; the Christian church will still be translating and publishing new editions of the Bible in many different languages in the year 2425, unless the world has come to an end by then. One day, there will be no more need of Bible translation because we will all see God clearly, face to face. But until that day, we will need to keep on searching for good, accurate and natural ways of expressing the Greek and Hebrew text in all sorts of languages. We can no more finish Bible translation than we can finish the Great Commission.
You may already have read The Hunger Games (Hunger Games Trilogy), or perhaps seen the first film in the series (the second one is just out) and so you know what the story is all about.
For those who are not aware of it, the story is set in a dystopian future with a repressive government using a gladiatorial contest during which children fight to the death as a way of keeping a lid on social tension. Katniss Everdeen is a contestant in the games who goes on to become a figurehead for a rebellion against the government.
Viewed simply as a story; it is hard to complain about The Hunger Games, you keep turning the pages and you want to know what happens next. There are a few plot twists that take you by surprise and the whole thing bowls along at a pleasing pace. If you want good light reading, this fits the bill. It’s excellent, read-a-chapter-before-sleep or while-away-a-bus-journey reading. Currently, the whole series is availably cheaply for Kindle (those are the links I’ve given) and makes a very good buy (or would be, if my Kindle screen hadn’t just been broken).
However, there is a but…
While the storytelling is good, there are other aspects of the books which are less convincing. The future society is poorly painted and barely believable, the central dilemma of is it OK to kill rather than be killed is thinly and inadequately explored and the emotional triangle at the heart of the story is pretty naff. To be honest, I don’t think this matters very much – it’s only a story. But some people have invested more significance in these books than they can carry and at that level, they do disappoint.
Archbishop Cranmer came out with this quote in the context of Christian schools, but it is of much wider relevance and well worth quoting:
Mission belongs to God and flows from the heart of God: it is not an exclusively human activity. There is perhaps no more vital a role for a mission-orientated church than engagement in the task of education, to help impart truth, forge peace, renew creation and tell of the redemption of humanity and the coming Kingdom. It is distinct from evangelisation – indeed, it is much bigger: it is not the task of church schools to convert children: it is, as Moltmann puts it, to embrace all activities that serve to liberate man from his slavery. Evangelism has to be the focus of mission, but expressed through love and transmitted and fostered by moral leadership.
One of the things that I find fascinating about social media is the way in which people often act in a completely different way to how they would in real “offline” life. There are a couple of things in particular which are increasingly common and which I find rather frustrating.
Spreading Facebook Hoaxes
There have always been people who are happy to spread unfounded and possibly malicious rumours without worrying about their veracity. However email and more latterly Facebook have raised this sad tendency to a whole new level. What is worse, normally sensible and sane people get involved in spreading rumours, something they would be unlikely to do if they weren’t in front of a computer screen.
There are all sorts of different hoaxes; many of them feeding the feeling that Christians are being persecuted in the UK and the US. Others slander individuals or commercial companies; often for no apparent reason.
The problem with these hoaxes is not simply that they are a waste of effort and electrons, but the more rubbish that is spread on the Internet, the less likely we are to believe things that actually are true and which are worthy of our attention. When people spread false rumours about Marks and Spencers, we are less likely to believe the true criticisms of Nestlé.
It is easy to check whether or not the rumours that circulate on Facebook are true. You can either visit snopes.com and type some of the details in the search box or you can run your own Google search like this one.
“Aren’t I Wonderful” Tweets
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone above the age of six or seven say something along the lines of “my friend thinks I’m really clever and that I did a really good thing“. However, on twitter this is apparently perfectly normal behaviour. Perfectly normal and well balanced people will ‘retweet’ compliments that people have paid them. Person X makes sure that we can all see that person Y thinks that X is the best thing since sliced bread. Am I the only one who finds this strange – especially from Christian leaders?
This is a complex area and we need to recognise that. The etiquette of Twitter is in its infancy and there must be a place where it is possible to draw people’s attention to how others have commented on your work. However, there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed – even if it is a bit fuzzy – and a lot of people spend a significant proportion of their Twitter lives across that line.
I will admit that I have probably been guilty of both of these at some point in the past – though I try very hard to avoid both temptations.
On a related note; this is an excellent overview of how Christians should interact with technology.
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