Equipping the Church to Translate the Word
I recently purchased a New Testament, newly translated for a people with no Scriptures in their language. It was exciting to see the culmination of so many years of work. My heart sank, though, when I turned to the Gospel of John and saw that it was the Gospel of Yaaya. Who is Yaaya? Could this be yet another Muslim Idiom Translation? 1. What is a …
Read More about 10 Unanswered Questions About Muslim Idiom Translations of the Bible
Who is the Bible for? Who are the intended readers of a Bible translation? To use a more technical term, who is the ‘audience’ in translation? For centuries, it was generally believed that one translation was sufficient and that the translation was for the entire church and, by extension, even for an entire Christian nation. However, today, we have …
The field of Bible translation is filled with theories, principles, frames and frameworks. When it comes to the relevance of the Scriptures themselves for the task of translation, little is heard beyond references to the Great Commission. I present here ten affirmations about Bible translation drawn in large part from the Scriptures with the conviction …
High in the Finisterre Mountains of Papua New Guinea, Luke Ketenu wrote a letter requesting a wokman ‘worker’ come to his community, referring to a missionary who could translate God's Word and then teach his people. Luke wrote his letter on May 28, 2004; he had written before, and he will no doubt continue writing. Far too often people groups receive …
In this series on a theology of Bible translation, we are setting forth foundational propositions about God, the Scriptures, and the languages of the world. In the first and second blog posts, we discussed four propositions derived from Scripture. We will briefly summarize these propositions below and then turn to the fifth and final proposition. As we …
