contextualization and the translation of the scriptures

8/12/2019 Contextualization and the Translation of the Scriptures

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Contextualization of Theology

These are the transcriptions of a few of the lectures from the course taught by John A. Gration,Ph.D., at Wheaton Graduate School, 1991.

Used by permission of Wheaton College.


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John A. Gration 2 3

We want to understand the Greek New Testa-ment meaning and we want to get it as equalas possible into the language were translatingintolets say, in Angor. We want the people to

be able to understand it in their own language.You can say the formal equivalence method

was focusing on the text itself. The overly free

approach was really focusing on the audience.With dynamic equivalence we want to focus on

both of them. Both of them are there to guideus as we translate. An example of that might bethe Good News Bible, and I think the New Inter-national Version also tries to be dynamicallyequivalent.

Gration:Can you give us an example of anEnglish translation that focuses heavily on thesource language, which I suppose would fit morethe formal equivalency youve talked about?

Litteral:All right. Lets look at somethingfrom the American Standard Version. Ill read2 Corinthians 10:14-16, and this will give you a

feeling of how difficult it is to understand eventhough all the words are English, when theyresticking pretty close to the Greek. Listen to this:

For we stretch not ourselves over much asthough we reach not unto you, for we cameeven as far as unto you in the gospel ofChrist, not glorifying beyond our measure,that is, in other mens labors, but havinghope that as your faith groweth we shall bemagnified in you according to our provinceunto further abundance, so as to preach thegospel even unto the parts beyond you, andnot to glory in anothers province in regardto things already to our hand.

You can see that is very difficult to understand.Gration:Sounds like all Greek to me, and I

guess what youre saying is that thats part ofthe problem. In other words, I hear you sayingthat we cant be totally focused on the text, norcan we just focus on the audience. We reallyhave to come up with both, dont we?

Litteral:Yes. Look at the helpful chart whichcomes from Eugene Glassmans book on thetranslation debate, in which he shows this sortof relationship between these. On the left yousee the formal equivalence, or correspondence,which focuses on the form of the words, andthe meanings really lost or distorted, as I illus-

trated in that reading. On the other extreme, onthe right, we have theparaphraseby addition,deletion, or changing of the message. In otherwords, somethings been left out, somethings

been added, and its been changed so muchthat the message is not faithful.

But in the middle are the good translations,

what we call dynamic equivalents. The form isrestructuredthat is, the grammar, the syntax,and the lexicon or the vocabulary have beenrestructuredbut they preserve the meaningof the original.

Gration:As a translator, what are some basicthings that you always have to keep in mind?

Litteral:As I talk with people about transla-tion, we keep coming back to three things:accuracy, naturalness, and clarity.

Accuracymeans that the meaning must bethe same between the two languages. Were

not free to put our own meaning in, to add it orsubtract it. We want the total meaning to be thesame, as much as possible, between the twolanguages.

Naturalmeans that it sounds like the languagesounds. That passage I read to you didnt soundlike English. It was a group of English words,

but it was not English. Part of it was archaic,but even its grammar wasnt English. So wewant a translation to sound as much as possiblethe way something sounds in that language,so that it doesnt really sound like somethingtranslated, but like something thats authoredor created in that language.

The third point is that we want it to be clear.Many times in our experiences, lets say in

working with an archaic translation, we mayhave to read something several times to get themeaning. With a focus on clarity we wantpeople to be able to understand it readily. Theyshouldnt have to read it three or four times andsay, Oh, thatswhat it means. So accuracy,

naturalness, and clarity: all are very important.Gration:Youve given us some pretty tough

guidelines. How do you really go about doingit? What are the steps that you as a translatortake in achieving this kind of goal?

Litteral:We look at a number of steps. First,we have to analyze the text that were translat-ing, that is, the original. Lets look at, say, theGreek New Testament. We have to analyze itto understand what it is saying. This is whereexegesis comes in. We look at the historical

background, the ideas of the time, the grammar.We look at all of these together, and then weanalyze the text, and we understand what the

meaning is, and we get that into as simple aform as we can.

Gration:So youre saying that a Bible transla-tor must be more than just a good linguist. Hereally has to be a Bible student. Is that right?

Litteral:Very much so. In fact, after translatorshave the language under their belt, a lot of their


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time goes to the area of exegesis: really whatdoes this mean? Much time goes into that.

Gration:Where do we go from there? Wevefigured out what Paul meant when he wrote tothe Romans in the first century. Now wereworking on the Angor. Whats the next step?

Litteral:The next thing we do is to transfer

this meaning. In the analysis step we try to getthat as simple as we can. Lets say working inEnglish, we get that into simple form; then wetransfer this meaning across into the Angorlanguage. The transfer involves restructuring itand making the meaning come out into thestructure of the Angor language. We call thisrestructuring.

So there are the three steps. Look at the dia-gram of this. We start with the original text.We analyze that so weve got its underlyingmeaning, and that is what we transfer across.But then we have to put that into the languageof the Angor. So we come back to the forms ofthe language, and that we call the restructuringpart.

Gration:In that restructuring, you must go

through some process of analysis. What do youreally analyze in the process?

Litteral:We talk about semantic analysis.Semantics is a technical term for the analysis ofmeaning. We look at words and we have todiscover their semantic parts.

In semantics we talk about four things. Wesay there are objects: trees and houses, fingers

and people. There are events, things that peopledo: we sit, we stand, we walk, we sleep. Then

there are attributes or qualities: we say some-one is good or we say the ball is yellow or thesky is blue. Those are attributes. Then we haverelations. We add things together (and) orwe say hes in the house or its on the table.These four things ordinarily come out with aone-to-one relationship in the grammar. Lets

say objects often come out as nouns. Eventscome out as verbs. Attributes or qualities,whichever you call them, come out as adjectives.Relational things come out as prepositions (in,out) or conjunctions (and, but, although). Theproblem comes when this relationship is notquite so simple.

Gration:When is that? It seems to me that ifyou have a noun in Greek to be translated, why

dont you translate it as a noun where you are?Why cant you just have an equivalent transla-tion?

Litteral:Lets take one of our favorite verses.We talk about being saved by grace. We need

to analyze this and see what is going on in thistext, whos doing what. We talk about beingsaved. But Angor doesnt have a passive, sowe have to analyze the grammar of the Greekand find out what all is involved. Who all isparticipating in this, so that we can say you

are saved by grace? There is no way to make

that passive. Weve got to say who did it. Whatwe do is to say who is doing this, and we wouldsay it is God. So we know what that part is.

Grace is a noun, but what does it mean?It basically means to be gracious or to lovefreely. In Angor that comes across as to lovefor nothing, or to love freely would be a

better way to do it. Then, we are the people

who are saved or who escape.So it would come out something like this:

God loves you freely, and God causes you toescape. Through a restructuring of this verse,an analysis of it, finding out what its componentparts are, you are saved by grace comes out asGod loves you freely and causes you to escape.

Gration:Once again its a prime example ofthe fact that you really have to know the mean-

ing in the original and then transfer that samemeaning into the receptor language. In yourexample you almost have two sentences.

Litteral:Thats right. Thats the way it has tobe done in Angor. Many ways in the target lan-guage, say Angor, things that we would put asadverbs will come out verbs. So this is really

becoming natural in their own language.

Gration:This is interesting. Why dont yougive us another example. What about the word

redemption? Thats a key biblical word.Litteral:Thats one that has a lot of meaningto us, but many times we dont think of whatall is involved in that. The background of that,of course, is slavery and setting someone free,

buying a slave and setting him free. But whatare the things involved in redemption? That is

a noun in the grammar, but it has a number ofcomponent parts. Lets look at them.

First, an event is involved, so we talk aboutsetting someone free, or redeeming someone;so we can change it to a verb and say redeem.Thats the event. An object is also involved.What do you do when you redeem an object?

We would say you make it free, so a quality isalso involved, freedom, and thats not indicated

as an adjective here. So we have God as anobject. Hes doing something to another object,which is us, and hes changing the situation:theres a change in quality. So basically, it comesout as God makes us freeand thats what


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redemption is. In Angor that would be the wayit would come. Instead of saying redemptionwe would have to talk about God making us free.

Gration:So you take a noun and turn it intoan event with an attribute and an object. Is thisstructural or semantic analysis the only kind ofanalysis that you do in restructuring?

Litteral:No. We need also to look at thevocabulary, at the connotations and the denota-tions of words, whereas before we were lookingat the components and structure. Most words,probably all words, have several kinds of mean-

ing. One is denotation: what does a word denote?Its analytical. Lets take the word woman.What does it denote? You could say a womanis an adult female. Thats analytical but itdoesnt have much connotation. Now lets takea word like lady. We could say a lady is alsoan adult female. But the word also has positiveconnotations. We have warm feelings about the

lady, so we say there are connotations there.Anytime were translating we have to be carefulto take both denotation and connotation intoconsideration. Its not just getting the bare facts.What is the emotive meaning as well?

Another example would be mother. For us,mother is going to have warm emotional con-notations. But if we said, My female parent is

living in Ohio, that doesnt have much warmconnotation. Its analytical, scientific. It hascorrect denotation but it doesnt have the con-notation, the emotional meaning.

Gration:Give us an example now of how allthis relates to translation.

Litteral:All right. Lets look at why the wordchoice is very important. An example comesfrom John 1:11-12. As we translated that, westarted off on our own. Its a very meaningfulverse talking about our receiving Christ. Atfirst we took a very prosaic approach and lookedfor the word receive, and we had a word forreceive. If someone gives me a ball or gives mesome food to eat, I receive it. So I tried thatword: lets receive Christ; but that didnt evenget to first base. We struck out, because you

receive things, but you cant receivepeople. Sothat showed us that when translating youalways have to be interacting with the people

to see what a word really means to them.The next thing that came up in discussion

was a word meaning to receive in your house.That basically means to house someone. Itmeans literally to put them to the house. Ithought, boy, that is good! The idea is thatvisitors come through and you welcome them

into your house and you befriend them andyou take care of their needs. Its like when wego out and stay in the village; we stay in thepastors house; he would do that for us. Wethought, thats it! But that wasnt quite it either.We got to discussing that and they said, Thats

sort of temporary. So that didnt have quite

the right connotation.Finally what the mother tongue translator

came up with, which is whats been accepted,literally means you take to your skin, whichmeans you take in a permanent relationship.This means someone becomes a part of thecommunity. And so it comes out in Angor thatto become a Christian, or to receive Christ, is to

make him a part of you as if you were receivingsomeone into your community or into yourfamily, as if you adopted someone.

Gration:That shows the value again of havingnationals work with you, and thats the veryheart and essence of Wycliffes work. Let meask you: in this instance you found the rightword after you fumbled around several times,and you got the best onebut what do you do

when there is no word?Litteral:Again we have to go back to the

community and talk with them. The thing Iwould start out with is saying, by story, byexplanation, this is what I want to try to get.Lets take, for example, the word God. Now,this is a big problem, especially in Papua NewGuinea, Melanesia, where we work, because

most of those cultures do not have a concept ofa supreme being. Most cultures do, but these

dont.There are several ways we can approach it.The first thing I would do would be to talk withthe leaders, the people, and say this is whoGod is. Maybe we could translate Genesis, tellthem the stories of Genesis, creation, and ask,Do you have anyone like this? They said,

No. So the first thing we do is look for a localterm. If weve got it, thats fine. If we dont, wehave to try another alternative.

The second alternative is, can we create anew term or phrase? In some cases this has

been done, and its strongly to be encouragedif theres no indigenous term. Some have used

the creator or the supreme one or the onewho lives above in heaven. But this is not the

way the Angor chose to go. They chose a thirdalternative, what we call borrowing, and inthat case they chose to use the word Got, whichis borrowed from English into Pidgin English,

because that is what the missions in the area


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are using. So they take basically an empty termthat has very little meaning to them, and bystories and by communication they build mean-ing into it.

Gration:What do they do with the wordspirit?

Litteral:This is one of the problems we run

into. There is no generic term that covers forspirit. They have lots of names for differentkinds of spirits: theres a bush spirit; theresone that lives in water holes, one that lives incaves, some that live in the sky. But theres nogeneral term for spirit. What they came upwith is a general term which means being.For evil spirits they would say bad beings. Forangels they tried several thingsagain this isgoing back to the communityand basicallythey settled on a term that means Gods beings,Gods cohorts, Gods friends.

Gration:Thats a beautiful way of putting it.Almost contrary to popular opinion theres evenin the Greek a little ambiguity now and then; itdoesnt clarify and solve all of our questions.How do you handle ambiguous terms or con-structions when you get into a receptor language?

Litteral:This is fascinating and this is wherethe challenge of translation comes. To give anexample: in Angor you cant say brother. Manylanguages in the world are like this. That is,you have to talk about an older brother or ayounger brother; theres no one term. When youlook at it from the receptor language viewpoint,the Greek is ambiguous when it says Jamesthe son of Zebedee and his brother John. What

kind of brother is it? Theres no word in Angorthat just says brother, so we have to know ifJohn is Jamess older brother or younger brother.The Greek doesnt tell us, but we cant leave itambiguous. Theres no way in the language

just to leave it. We have to make a choice.So what we do is to start by looking at the

culture and trying to understand a little moreabout the New Testament. (By the way, com-mentaries dont help us in these cases becauseits not a question for Western cultures.) Basicallywhat weve found out is that in Hebrew culturethe older brother is the most important, andthe names of important people are given first.

So when a Gospel writer talks about James andhis brother, John, we assume that James is theolder because his name is mentioned first. So itcomes across as James, the son of Zebedee,and his younger brother, John.

Gration:Even in our English translations, ifwe might come back to that for a moment, we

talk about communication load. Take a momenton that topic if you would.

Litteral:All right. When we translate, we haveto make the translation as it comes, as its read,to not come too fast with too much informationpacked into one little bit, or its going to be very

difficult to understand. Sometimes sentences

can be too long, especially with newly literatepeople or people who are new to reading. InEphesians 1 Paul has a very, very long sentence.Most modern translations are going to breakthat up into smaller sentences so the communi-cation load is lighter. You can read a sentenceand get so much, and then go on to the next,rather than trying to go through a lot of words

to hold this all together until you get to the nextsentence.

Gration:From what I understand, thats verykey. What about actual vocabulary?

Litteral:The vocabulary is also going to makea difference. We want to consider the educa-tional level of the people that we are translatingfor. Some terms are going to be more difficultfor people to understand than others. So we get

words like teach versus instruct. Instruct is aword for a higher level of education, so itsgoing to be more difficult for some people tounderstand, whereas teach is simpler. Peopleunderstand it more readily. To show versusto illustrate, or to make clear versus to eluci-date, or to ask versus to interrogate. If weconsider the peoples level of language, their

level of education, we may want to keep itsimple. If were talking to, lets say, elites in

America, we would maybe want to use elucidateinstead of educate or use interrogate instead ofask. We want to keep the level of vocabulary sothat people can understand it easily.

Gration:So this is the reason why we have,even in English, various translations: becausethere really are different audiences in mind.

Litteral:Very definitely. Something like theNew English Bible is more for the more highlyeducated. The Good News Bible, or TodaysEnglish Version, was translated keeping inmind people who speak English as a secondlanguage, such as immigrants to America.Translations aim at their audience so they keep

the information load appropriate.Gration:So we have to be careful about

making comparisons, remembering that, in asense, comparisons are odious. And we have toask not, Is this a good translation? but, Isthis new translation good for its particularaudience?


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Litteral:Thats true, and it cant be empha-sized enough that there is no one translationthats right and another ones wrong. We needto keep in consideration who its for and themethod of translating.

Gration:When we were discussing the matterof finding an appropriate word, you said youwent back to the community. Maybe you couldconclude by discussing briefly the role of thecommunity or the role of the church, as it comesinto existence, in translation. How important isthis? What is the dynamic relationship betweentranslation and the emerging church?

Litteral:Youll see a chart that shows thechurch at the top with an arrow slanting downto translation, and then from translation anotherarrow feeding back into the church. This is acrucial part of translation that some people miss.Someone sent in a letter, I think, to Wycliffethat said, I cant go and translate, but if youllsend me a dictionary, then I will translate theScriptures for these people and give it to them.Thats a very simple idea of translation. Theweakness there is that translation isnt just aone-way process. There has to be feedback. So,as I said before, were going to the communityconstantly to find out how they understand it.The role of translation is going to people, andthey need to be actively involved.

What happens, as happened in Angor, isthat the translation was there, it was read, andthen it went to the church. As the church grewthey would preach and then they would selectcertain terms. For instance, at first they wanted

to use a term for baptism which meant to dunk.Thats the first thing they saw: you put a personunder the water. When they began to under-stand more what was involved with it, theylooked at it more as washing because that hadmore ritual meaning, and so they used the wordto wash. That came from the church.

The translations feed into the church, givingthem more understanding of what Gods Wordsays. Then the church itself, as it communicatesthat orally in discussion, selects many times analternate way of communicating, and it feeds

back into the translation. That is the crucial

process.

Gration:So youre saying that the translationgrows with the church and, in a very real sense,the church grows with the translation, so that

theres a dynamic interaction.Litteral:Thats right. That is the ideal way for

a translation to take place, both of them growing

together.Gration:And thats why you mentioned the

use of nationals as more than helpers. They are

real partners.Litteral:Thats right. As I see it, the mother

tongue translator, the national working with us,

is the prime person, the most important person.We are helping him to understand it, but he isthe most crucial one. The one that has the pencil

or pen in his hand doing the translation is crucial,and if that can be a mother tongue or nationaltranslator, that is better. And of course, he is

interacting with the church. He is preaching,he is discussing with them, he is hearing what

they are saying, and he knows the culture much,much better than we do. So he adds a lot ofrichness to the translation. We are not only help-ing him to translate, but we are also developinga person, a leader.

Gration:Youve been devoting a good partof your time, apparently, to developing thesemother tongue translators. It must be a very

rich and rewarding experience to see thembegin to emerge and do some of the things youwere trained to do.

Litteral:Yes. Probably the primary task of usexpatriates is enabling the people there to dothe task that formerly we did, because they can

do it better. And we also want to be building thecommunity. That is where most of my effortsare going now.

Gration:Thank you, Dr. Litteral. Certainlytranslation is the epitome and the essence ofcontextualization. Im sure weve all sensed that

its an exciting and a rewarding field of minis-try to make Gods living Word available andunderstandable to a people for the first time.

Im sure we have sensed also that its not aneasy task but a privileged one, and we thankyou, Dr. Litteral, for this time thats been veryinsightful and informative and also inspiring.

contextualization and the translation of the scriptures

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