A History of Bible Translation: Chapter 5 - Early Missionary Translations

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries some Bible translation was carried out in non-European languages, but the main movement forward was in the 19^th century. William Carey, of the Baptist Missionary Society, and known as the father of modern missions, began translation work in Hindi and Urdu, and later this was completed by Henry Martyn, the complete Bible being published in 1843. Henry Martyn was a prolific translator, working with local colleagues, and translating the Bible into several languages: Hindi/Urdu, Persian (Farsi), and Judaeo-Persian. Urdu is an artificial language based on Hindi grammar with many Persian and some Turkic loan words. It was needed by the Moghul hordes from Central Asia who invaded Northern India and built and empire resulting in edifices such as the Taj Mahal.[1] Martyn passed away[2] aged only thirty-one. It’s extraordinary to think that he achieved more before the age of thirty than most of us do in a lifetime.

There were many other translations carried out in the 19^th century. A new translation was made in Turkish and published in 1878. After Ataturk’s reforms in the 20^th century this version was republished in the new Latin script. The Bible was translated into Russian by the Russian Bible Society, who began work in 1813 and finally published the ‘Synodal Bible’ in 1876. Today it is available in several different formats, for Orthodox and Protestants alike.[3]

The British and Foreign Bible Society was formed in 1804, and although it wasn’t the first ‘Bible Society’, it became the most influential. It’s first project was to publish the Bible in Welsh, the language of Mary Jones, who walked twenty miles to her nearest town, Bala, to obtain a Bible in her mother tongue. The BFBS had a policy of publishing Bibles ‘without note or comment’ due to their non-denominational stance. The Bible should be available to all, no matter what their background, they believed. After the BFBS many other Bible Societies began around the world, all them loosely connected by a global network called the United Bible Societies. The Bible Society exists in many countries, and is locally owned, and exists to publish the Bible in the national language and larger minority languages. In some cases they carry out new translations into those languages, as and when they are needed.[4]

The focus during the 19^th century tended to be on word-for-word translations, sometimes called ‘literal’, ‘modified literal’, or ‘form-based’ translations. These are not necessarily more accurate, however, and as a result there has been a shift to meaning-based translations over the last century or so. In practice any translation is somewhere on the spectrum between form-based and meaning-based, and also on the spectrum between literary[5] and colloquial. It’s quite possible, however, for a translation to be both meaning-based and literary (and poetic, in places), or form-based and colloquial.

It’s impossible to translate literally. That’s because languages vary in their features: some are separative, some agglutinative.[6] Some tend to put the verb first in a phrase, others last. People use idioms and metaphors all they time when they speak, as language is inherently figurative, and on top of that we now know that communication is pragmatic – we tell people what they need to know and no more – i.e. a lot of communication uses implicatures. Recent studies into cognitive linguistics, relevance theory, and speech act theory show us that communication involves way more than words used in a certain grammatical construction.

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[1] They were led by Timur, known as Tamerlane, who was Turkic and Mongol in ancestry, but also spoke the language of wider communication of the area, Persian.

[2] From fever, or exhaustion, or both.

[3] The Orthodox version contains the Apocrypha.

[4] For instance there is a new Russian Bible Society translation known as the Contemporary Russian Version. It is a meaning-based translation, and complements the Synodal translation.

[5] A focus on high style of language, and perhaps a greater emphasis on using poetic forms where appropriate.
[6] These stick affixes on words, making them very long, not like German, but like Turkic languages, which often  have words eight to ten syllables long. On top of that they are very ‘productive’ in that a certain affix, such as the pluraliser -lar/-ler can be used in a variety of places adding to both nouns and verbs.