Scripture Engagement

Despite what I posted earlier about people having several mother tongues, it's still a fundamental belief of ours that people need to access Scripture in a language they know well, that they are fluent in. Today I was asked in an email for articles that back this up. In fact, here is the question: 'I’m writing a paper based on my research about the impact of reading the Bible in English versus mother tongue, and wondered if you have articles to hand or Wycliffe/SLI (sic.) statements of values which might outline why we believe that having the Bible in one’s heart language/mother tongue is important (even if the English translation is available).' The question was written by a PhD student. By SLI she means SIL , I think. Wycliffe is short for  Wycliffe Bible Translators . TBH I was slightly confused by the question. Why 'English'. Did she mean 'the Language of Wider Communication' (Spanish, French, Russian, Classical Arabic... )? Here is my reply: ...

Any translation goes through several stages before it is published: Drafting Team check Exegetical check Test & Review Lastly a consultant meets with the team and discusses any translation issues, making suggestion for changes before it is published. I'm now going to unpack why each stage is needed and what happens during each stage. Draft: the translator studies the passage, preferably in the original language, but if not, s/he compares several different versions in several different languages, and makes an oral draft (or sometimes they listen to several different audio versions instead). They do this by closing all their books, if they have any open, then speaking the passage into a recording device (like a smartphone). At least 2-3 verses are drafted at a time, then the translator listens to their recording, and checks they haven't left anything out. They might then keyboard it into their computer, using a program called ' Paratext '. Why do we dr...

Since Walter Ong's book back in the 80s many have written on the oral-literate spectrum. Maxey , amongst others, correctly criticises the polarising of oral and literate cultures, and points out that it's easy to read 'primitive' for 'oral' and 'developed' for 'literate' - not a divide we want to promote in these post-colonial (or global) days. I want to bring up another issue. It seems to me that oral-literate is not the only relevant spectrum. We also need to consider mono-cultural to multi-cultural, and monolingual to multilingual spectra. If the people we are working with are fairly mono-cultural this will also affect the way people think. (I was going to say that people are less likely to be able to think the way others think, but in light of recent events such as Brexit, the election of right-wing leaders, and so on, it seems we're pretty poor at that in Western countries too.) Another important factor is that Western cultures ten...