Wycliffe Bible Translators

Two weeks ago I went down to Wycliffe Bible Translators in West Chicago for their week-long Taste Of Translation And Linguistics course. I didn't stay the whole week, but I learned some very interesting things about Bible translation and linguistics. We had several courses on Phonetics, Language Learning (how to pick up a language through immersion), Translation, and Grammar.

I had no idea how much work went into translating the Bible for a single language group. In most cases, these language groups don't even have a written form of their language! In those cases, Wycliffe teams study the sounds and the phrases of the language and attempt to create a written language for them. This also involves demonstrating the usefulness of literacy, since it's a completely foreign concept to them. After creating a written language, Wycliffe teams study the grammar of the language and start the official "translation" process.

One of our classes involved pretending to translate Psalm 23, and we ran into some interesting problems. The instructor pointed out certain troublesome phrases, for example, "He makes me lie down in green pastures" shouldn't give the impression that the Lord is forcing the author to lie down. Also, the people group for whom we are translating might not live near any "green pastures", so we might need to use a different analogy. He cautioned us however that though it's OK to change "green pastures" into a cultural equivalent, it is not OK to change historical events. For example, even if the people group doesn't have fig trees, it's not acceptable to translate Mark 11:21 with "Rabbi, look! The mango tree you cursed has withered!"

Even though full-time missionary work isn't for me, I still enjoyed my time at Wycliffe. I met lots of great people and I learned a lot about translation. I've already used some of my new phonetics knowledge to help Rebecca pronounce some consonants. :-)

Before I left Wycliffe, I spoke with a few of their tech guys about using the computer to do some of the work remotely (mostly the grammar and translation). They admitted that they're not as far along as they'd like to be, but that they're working on it. The phonetics work and the language-learning still obviously has to be done "on-site". But the creation of the alphabet, diagramming the grammatical structure of the language, and the actual translation should be able to be done anywhere. I hope they continue to improve their infrastructure... maybe someday I'll be able to do some of the translation work from my computer here!