Why do this project?
For most, this pretty well looks like Greek to you:
1 John 5:4-5
Isn't it great that God doesn't require that we learn a foreign language, or Greek, to find Him and to do His will? Right from the birth of the church at Pentecost, translation is something that the Holy Spirit has used and sponsored.
So most people would not argue with the necessity of Bible translation itself. But in the case of the Double Stuff project, there are already translations into the national language. Do the people of the province where we work really need another translation? Our experience there says they really do. National language Bibles are written in very “proper” language, not the every-day trade language the people speak.
Let's use English as an example, to help you understand the language situation where we work. Let's take 1 John 5:4-5 as our example, and let's assume that you are a native speaker of American English, so this translation sounds fairly natural and makes good sense to you:
This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.
5 Who is it that overcomes the world?
Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. (NIV)
But imagine that there are people in your country who would understand much better if it was translated like these examples:
5 Who dat kin win out ginst de wol? De people wa bleebe dat Jedus God Son, dey de onliest one dem wa win out ginst de wol.
5 Da guy dat stay shua dat Jesus God’s Boy, az da ony guy dat can stand up agains da bad kine stuff inside da world, an win.
There really are people who
talk like that! The first is from
the Gullah New Testament (North & South Carolina coast,
published
in 2005, 250,000 speakers including at least 7,000
monolinguals),
and the
second is from the Hawaiian Pidgin New Testament (published in
2000, over 8,000 speakers).
Like the Gullah people and
native
Hawaiians, the people in the province
where we work are in frequent contact with the
“proper”
national language (which is
NOT English). But that language doesn't
speak to their hearts, and it is often difficult to understand. Did you
happen to notice that it took you extra
work
to understand the two
examples above, or did you just scan them and give up trying to
understand? Just imagine, where we work there are somewhere
between 200,000 and one million people who have to work that
hard
to understand God's Word, and
only
those who have high motivation
resist the urge to give up trying to understand it.
Imagine this: Oreo is just one of 270
tribal languages in the province where we work, and there are
still around 160 of those languages where Bible translation has not
yet started. One side effect of
all those tribal languages is that there are big variations in
how
the different groups speak the national language.
One of the important strategies
for giving God's Word
to those 160+ languages is to
train bilingual native speakers to do the work of translation
themselves.
These are called Mother
Tongue
Translators.
But MTTs in
our province need a translation of the Scripture into the every-day (or
colloquial) form of the national language.
In other words, they have a lot of difficulties translating from a
translation that resembles the NIV or RSV. They need something
comparable to the Gullah or Hawaiian Pidgin examples above if they are
going to do an accurate job of translating into their mother tongues.
So
there are three goals in mind
for the
Double Stuff Project:
1) To make a meaningful model translation for MTTs which speaks to them
in the colloquial form of the national language. 2) To
provide MTTs with a window into the Greek source text, by giving them a
word-for-word Interlinear translation of the Greek. 3) To give MTTs
examples of how other languages in the region have translated, by
giving them “back translations.” And example of a back
translation is
found here.
A few MTTs are being trained
already.
Pictured here are quite a few of
the 70 trainees, representing 30 languages, that were part of
the
workshop held in May 2005.
We're making terrific progress with our Double Stuff team collaborating via the Internet. For up-to-date news and recent pictures of our team, see Oreoplace.wordpress.com.
Why does it take so long to translate the Bible?
There are good reasons why the Oreo New Testament translation took 21 years, and why we reasonably hope to complete the Double Stuff translation in half the time. Get the full answer here.
