Beeson podcast, Episode 453
Roy Ciampa
July 16, 2019
https://beesondivinity.com/podcast/2019/Unfinished-Task-Bible-Translation

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:     Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today we have the privilege of hearing a lecture by Dr. Roy Ciampa. Dr. Ciampa is a new colleague at Samford. He is the Louis and Ann Armstrong Professor of Religion and chair in the newly named Biblical and Religious Studies Department. Before coming to Samford, Dr. Ciampa worked at the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship with the American Bible Society. He's been a professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a missionary to Portugal, where he was involved in translating the Bible into Portuguese.

Timothy George:     He's a wonderful New Testament scholar, author of a number books. You're going to enjoy this lecture today because he's speaking about something he knows very well, the unfinished and never-ending task of Bible translation. This lecture was originally given in a series sponsored by our global center here at Beeson called Global Voices. Let's go to the global center and listen to our colleague and friend, Dr. Roy Ciampa, as he speaks on the unfinished and never-ending task of Bible translation.

Roy Ciampa:         ... very happy to be here and to talk about this subject about which I am very passionate and very many people are passionate, which is one of the reasons why Bible translators are sometimes burned at the stake. There are lots of passions about Bible translation, what you should or should not be doing when you're translating the Bible. Being burned at the stake is just one of the challenges. Not so much a contemporary challenge as a historical challenge, but we want to talk about this unfinished and never-ending task, some of the contemporary challenges and opportunities.

Roy Ciampa:         This is going to be like drinking water from a fire hose. I am going to run you through a whole number of challenges and opportunities and issues in Bible translation. I'm going to go through it as quickly as I can. I encourage you to take notes about things that you'd like to talk about, because the reason I'm going to go quickly is in the hope of having time at the end for a Q&A, and just talk about the things that you're most interested in talking about of all the myriad issues that I'm going to raise, okay? We've saved a little bit of time because you've already got all my background, so there's nothing more I need to do with that.

Roy Ciampa:         We can move right into a little bit of context for the world of Bible translation. These images are from the website of the Forum of Bible Agencies International, known as FOBAI, which is an organization that tries to keep open communication between all of these agencies working in the area of Bible translation work around the world. Now, this is not all of the agencies. This is just the first set of agencies I could fit on a screen. Of course, I was working with American Bible Society, which had me collaborating with folks from United Bible Societies, and from Seed Company, and Wycliffe Bible Translators. These are just some of the people. This list of members come from the FOBAI website, which is worth visiting.

Roy Ciampa:         If you're interested in finding out how you might be involved in Bible translation, we can talk about that, but these are many of the agencies that are promoting the work of Bible translation in various ways. Each one has its own focus, its own emphasis, its own special contribution. Probably the most well-known ones are Wycliffe Bible Translators, but that's actually a family of organizations. The two largest players are the various agencies related to Wycliffe Bible Translators. These agencies are united through the Wycliffe Global Alliance. These agencies include SIL International, Seed Company.

Roy Ciampa:         Wycliffe Associates is a new player with Wycliffe background and the Wycliffe name. Many people have been working known as Wycliffe Bible Translators in the states and raising their funding through them. Traditionally, they were working overseas as members of SIL International. Now they're working as members of SIL International or Seed Company or one of these other agencies.

Roy Ciampa:         The other big player are the United Bible Societies. These are national Bible societies all over the globe. I was working with the American Bible Society, but there are hundreds of different countries that have their own national Bible society which are dedicated to promoting the translation, printing, and distribution of God's word. One of the distinctives of United Bible Societies and the national Bible societies is that they are the main ones that have a focus on providing people with whole Bibles, whereas many Bible translation agencies are doing what they can to provide sample text, maybe to get a language a New Testament or reading certain, select texts from the Old Testament or Old to New Testament. It's often the United Bible Societies in collaboration with these other agencies that are focused on the whole Bible aspect of the work.

Roy Ciampa:         There are also smaller Bible translation agencies and institutes established in various regions around the world. I thought I listed one here, but maybe I'll bring them up later. In Kenya, they have a language and translation agency established in Kenya and focused on Bible translation work in that part of the world. There's The Word For The world, which is established and working out of South Africa. Many of these started off as North American-based agencies. More and more, they're global agencies, and there are regional agencies as well.

Roy Ciampa:         It's a complicated world. Actually, even to try and explain in detail or accuracy the relationship between all the Wycliffe agencies, it confuses people that are working for some of the Wycliffe agencies. Whether you're with Seed Company or you're with ... "I thought you were Wycliffe Bible Translators, but now you're SIL International, you're Seed Company. Is Wycliffe Associates the same thing as Wycliffe Bible Translators?" That would be a whole conversation on its own.

Roy Ciampa:         Some of the challenges. Usually when people think about challenges of Bible translation, when people come to our [inaudible 00:07:18] Bible translation, many times they think, "I'm going to learn more Greek and Hebrew because Bible translation is all about linguistics. I just need to know the language that I'm translating into, and I need to know the biblical languages. Once I know those two things, I'm ready to go."

Roy Ciampa:         Actually, translation is much more complicated than a linguistic process. Challenges are challenges about things that have to do, sometimes, with ideology and philosophy of translation. Questions like where are translation decisions being made, and by whom? Are people in Dallas, Texas, or someplace else in the United States, or London, England, making the decisions about how the Bible will be translated in Kenya, or Japan, or some other part of the world? Or do people in those parts of the world get to make those decisions? Where are they being made? Are they being made locally, are they being made at a distance? These are questions that are still being worked out by various agencies. Who can translate, and who gets to be called a translator? How much training do you have to have before you can be a translator? Do you have to know Greek and Hebrew? Do you have to have a college education, a seminary education?

Roy Ciampa:         In the past, they used to refer to the American expatriate. They would go overseas and work on a Bible translation. They were called the Bible translator. All the local people around them were called translation or language helpers. Now most agencies working in Bible translation realize that that wasn't quite fair and was an injustice, and would refer to the fact that, actually, what's going on is that the local people are the translators, sometimes referred to mother tongue translators. They're the ones that have all the linguistic resources in their language. They're the ones that can say whether or not this way or that way of translating something would make sense and what that would mean.

Roy Ciampa:         Now the tendency is to say the expatriate going over it might be an exegetical advisor or a translation adviser. The translators are the local people who speak that language as their mother tongue and speak it fluently. But that's not treated the same way everywhere. These are questions that are still being worked on in the 21st century, and certainly at the end of the 20th century.

Roy Ciampa:         Challenges like how to recruit translators without removing them from their economic context so they can continue working and living after a project is complete. Many translators are working from villages that depend on agriculture. They've worked on farms, their families have worked on farms [inaudible 00:10:07] agriculture for generations. If you take them out and say, "We're going to pay you a full-time salary for five, eight, 10 years while you work on this translation," that's wonderful.

Roy Ciampa:         What happens to them after the Bible translation is done? All of a sudden, they gave up their farm, they gave up their work. They're now well-trained as the translator into their language, their community, but you've got that translation done, and they may not be considered someone who would be a candidate to be a translation consultant. These are some of the ethical issues that translation agencies work with as they try to find as many translators and as much help as they can, but also try to work through how can we do this in an ethical way that doesn't actually work against the interests of the translator in their long-term ability to survive.

Roy Ciampa:         More recently, people have been asking questions like this: Do communities need to be converted to being literary cultures so they will value a printed book? For many years, this was the main priority. We were used to having our Bible as in the form of a book. We go to cultures where they don't even have their language written down, nobody has any written books, it's all in oral culture. The first thing we do is establish literacy programs to turn them from an oral culture into a literary culture. Now once they're a literary culture, we can give them a book to read, which is the Bible.

Roy Ciampa:         Well, that sometimes worked, and it sometimes it didn't work that well. So, more and more agencies are working on how to communicate God's word in oral means for oral cultures, and second guessing whether or not our first mission is to change societies into literate, that is, book literate societies. That is the question. Are oral translations appropriate for oral cultures?

Roy Ciampa:         By the way, in various places, I will use this kind of binary language. Literary, or literate, illiterate, book and oral. Those aren't very helpful, but we only have less than an hour. These are shortcuts we use to cut through and save some time. Otherwise, we could spend, obviously, a whole semester or a whole year, or we could have a whole master's degree program just on some of the things that we're talking about.

Roy Ciampa:         Then the question is, is the goal the production of a book or engagement with its message? Because unfortunately, in way too many places, people succeeded in producing a book. They have a great celebration, everyone come out and march and dance and celebrate. We now have God's word in our language. Hallelujah. Then it sits on a shelf some place. People are very proud to know that God's word also exists in their language, but they've never read it. They never learned to read, and they may not be all that ... While they may be motivated, that doesn't mean they actually are going to be able to read.

Roy Ciampa:         Of course, we have this problem in some countries. You may have heard of this country called America. In this country called America, there are all kinds of people that have books on their shelf, and they are literate, they can read, but they're not engaging with the word of God.

Roy Ciampa:         Actually, it's a very recent thing that Bible translation agencies have moved from the view that their job is to translate scripture, and then once it's translated, to print it up and distribute it, and then go on to the next project. Now they see what we call scripture engagement as part of their mission, making sure the people that are receiving the scriptures are actually engaging with them. That usually means not waiting until the whole project is done before giving people the scripture, but thinking about what do they want to do with the scripture now, what kinds of evangelistic work, missionary work, what kinds of discipleship do they want to do, what should we translate first. Then give them that so they can start engaging with it, and then give them more so they'll be engaging with that. That might slow down the project a little bit. It can also mean that they'll be engaging with the scripture all the way through if this is done well. Seeing scripture engagement as part of the mission is a pretty recent development.

Roy Ciampa:         Some of the challenges entail the fact that translation teams have a need for so many different kinds of expertise, as you might imagine. Biblical languages, cultural backgrounds, and I'm thinking about biblical cultural backgrounds here, theological sensitivity, sensitivity to cultural issues in their receptor culture, an expert feel for nuances of the receptor language. Ideally, you want to have gifted, literary wordsmiths, people that have this feel, "Is this just the right word? Does this sound right? Does this create the right connotation?" They need to be poets and wordsmiths, and not mere mechanics of language.

Roy Ciampa:         These are difficult combinations of things to put together. They also need to be aware of their own tendency to assume key bits of knowledge and information. You can translate the scripture in ways in which all this assumed knowledge is required to actually make sense of what you're reading. So, to have that sensitivity to how this is going to read, and what kind of sense this will make to people that don't know as much as what the translators know.

Roy Ciampa:         They also need the skills of diplomats to navigate church politics. You could produce the most perfect Bible translation ever produced in any language ever, but if you did something to offend the village chief or one of the key pastors or leaders in that area, it doesn't matter if it's perfect. It might not ever, ever be used. These are skills that Bible translators need to know.

Roy Ciampa:         By the way, our Bible translation track at Gordon-Conwell, we broke the track up--this is oversimplified--into three main areas. The first residency focused on questions of biblical interpretation and hermeneutics, which tend to be the things that most people thought that's what this whole thing should be about. But we had one year on biblical interpretation and hermeneutics. The second year was focused more on questions of translation theory and Bible translation theory and practice because you need to understand what translation is, how it works, how this has been discussed, what we're learning about translation in more recent years.

Roy Ciampa:         In the third year, we focus on leadership skills, including conflict resolution, group leadership, other kinds of things that say if a translation consultant doesn't know how to lead a group to have a successful project, it doesn't matter how brilliant they are and how much Greek and Hebrew they know. They'll never get that project done. Again, if they don't know how to navigate church politics and other kinds of politics, then that could be a danger to the success of their project.

Roy Ciampa:         In short, for a few of the points I've been making, translation is not a merely linguistic or mechanical [inaudible 00:17:55] and requires much more than knowledge of two different languages. Much, much more.

Roy Ciampa:         Questions that translators wrestle with are how much biblical literacy should be assumed, and how much literacy in general. We've already talked about the literacy question, but when you translate, can you use, say, the equivalent? In English, we say all the time we are justified by faith. How many people here believe in justification by faith? I hope some people have taken notes. All those hands not raised will be a problem. Is there a dean in the back that can keep track of this?

Roy Ciampa:         I believe in justification by faith, but even as that expression rolls off my tongue, I'm using the word justification and justify in a word that isn't normal for the English language. If you're in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, and somebody says something about justification, they're talking about whether or not somebody should or should not have done something, right? If they say somebody was justified, then they had a good reason for what they're doing. It has nothing to do with what we mean by justification by faith. Some Bible scholars or translators refer to this as Biblish. That is, English words, or they could be words in Japanese or some other language, that have special meanings that we expect people to understand when they're reading the Bible, that are different from the meanings of the words in everyday language.

Roy Ciampa:         So, how much of that knowledge, should they know what we mean by justification? Or should we translate it in such a way that it actually just means what it seems to mean? One way of translating justify would to be say they are declared righteous by God, for instance, in English, would be one approach to that.

Roy Ciampa:         By the way, I have opinions about almost everything I'm going to talk about, but I'm not going to share all of my opinions. They just may come through here or there.

Roy Ciampa:         Translators make questions about whether they want to translate following what's called a formal or a functional equivalent or dynamic equivalent model of translation. The formal equivalent tries to follow the word order and the structure of the original languages as much as possible. Dynamic equivalence pays more attention to the receptor language, and what are the right forms and actual forms in this language.

Roy Ciampa:         As someone who has worked in this area for a long time, it stands out to me that most people today, if you get a lecture on Bible translation, it's all about the difference between formal and dynamic or formal and functional equivalence. Frankly, that was the way it was framed back in the 1960s and '70s. The translation theory has gone on long from there, but in the world of Bible translation, people are still stuck pretty much in this paradigm.

Roy Ciampa:         I mention it, but I also want to mention that that's not the only set of philosophy questions to be asking. Another which sounds similar but is rather different is the question of foreignization and domestication, that is, to what extent should a foreign work seem like something locally produced. When people read their Bible in Angola, which is one of the places where I've spent years training Bible translators, should Angolans read the Bible and say, "Oh, this feels like it was written right here in Lubango or outside of Luanda"? Or should it feel foreign?

Roy Ciampa:         Now, with many of the questions I ask, you may think, "Well, that's a silly question. The answer is obvious." If you think that way, we can talk about that during the Q&A, because the answers don't tend to be quite so obvious.

Roy Ciampa:         No translation will foreignize completely, that is, will signal all the different ways this text actually reflects a foreign culture in a foreign time. No text will do [inaudible 00:22:00] text will domesticate completely, that is, make it feel like it's part of the modern culture and world. Every translation does some of both to one extent or another.

Roy Ciampa:         Should people be led to think that they're initial is a perfect representation of the original in all respects? This happens a lot. One of the ways you know it happens a lot is every time somebody produces a second translation in any language, people are shocked. "We already have God's word. Now you've produced a second translation? Are you saying that what we had wasn't God's word, it wasn't the perfect word of God?" Then what happens next is they compare the new translation to the old translation.

Roy Ciampa:         This happened in the translation project I was involved in, in Portugal. They had the Portuguese version of the King James version. Of course, when the contemporary version came up, people compared to the Portuguese, the Almada, which is like their King James. It was like, "Well, the Bible," meaning the Almada, "says this, but you said this. You need to fix this."

Roy Ciampa:         Part of that is because we so lift up translation, we are so afraid to let people know what translation really is and entails that they can't imagine that there could have been [inaudible 00:23:25] that the word could have been translated in the way that it was. So, you bring in another way, and it brings a crisis of faith. I think we need to be more honest about what translation entails and all the implications in ways that will support people's faith and not undermine it in the long run.

Roy Ciampa:         Sometimes I just throw in random things. This is not random, but this is going to be an issue that'll come up in other context. 1 John 3:9, the contemporary English version translates this, "Those born from God don't practice sin because God's DNA remains in them. They can't sin because they are born from God."

Roy Ciampa:         I had a little debate with one of the editors of the contemporary English version. They just weren't taking it from me. They said, "This is just how we do Bible translation today." I have a problem with this.

Roy Ciampa:         Can anyone imagine what my problem is? John and his readers were familiar with the idea of DNA? They had this advanced knowledge of what DNA is, so we can read our Bible and find out, "My goodness, we thought this was discovered times, but this is in the Bible."

Roy Ciampa:         That sort of thing happens not just in the contemporary English version, but in many other versions we'll see. There's the same problem as epileptic. Modern various versions will say that there was a young man suffering from epilepsy. Well, we'll look at that in a moment. They didn't know it as epilepsy back in Jesus' day.

Roy Ciampa:         Even the easy parts can be hard. How to translate Theos? How should we translate that? God. Well, that's the word we usually translate as God, but there are many places where Bible translation is done and the words they have for God, they're associated with their pre-Christian Pagan background. So, people raise all kinds of concerns. "We can't use that word for God because we're now talking about the true God, and this word was used for our gods that we don't think as that God."

Roy Ciampa:         Actually, I think a lot of Western prejudice can enter in right there. Does anyone remember when God first said, "Theos is the word for Me," and not for any of the other false gods out there? Does anyone remember what the Pagan Greeks called their Pagan gods? They were in the singular theos, from the plural theoi. The word that we use for our God was used in Pagan context long before it was used for Christian or Jewish meanings. Early Jews and Christians filled that word with new meaning, to be understood in light of what the scripture said about the one true God.

Roy Ciampa:         Now, this isn't me saying that every local deity or god or spirit in any place should be the right word for them to use for God. It's a bit more complicated, and we do have to be sensitive to say, "Well, no. Your word for God is tainted. Our word for God has this pure as the driven snow background."

Roy Ciampa:         I was at a translation conference, and an African scholar was sharing a translation that was done in their language. I don't remember what the language was. I didn't understand 98% of everything in that Bible translation, but there was like 2% that I understood because in this African language, whenever they came to a theological term, God, the Father, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, they used English. So, it'd be like blah, blah, blah, Holy Spirit, blah, blah, Jesus Christ, God the Father, blah, blah, blah. It's like, what on Earth? English was thought to have this kind of purity of a Christian language, and all the terms in their language were thought to be contaminated.

Roy Ciampa:         That's what I was just talking about. In our Bibles, you find Iesous, lots of Iesous in your English translation. Of course, that's the Greek word. We translate Jesus. Can someone read this to me from Greek?

Speaker 4:          [inaudible 00:27:55].

Roy Ciampa:         Iacobus, which would be like Jacob, right? That's James.

Roy Ciampa:         Even getting people to agree on how should we translate biblical names into a local culture, we don't represent our biblical names the same way they're represented in Greek, or in some cases, in Hebrew. If they don't know what a sheep is, or a wineskin, or a chariot or a charioteer, how do you deal with this? Do you provide them with a dictionary? Do you provide them with a picture book? Do you put in some substitution for something that would fill in a similar role in that context?

Roy Ciampa:         How about words like apostlas, baptisma, angelus, which we never translated in English? We just transliterate. Apostlas. Well, we don't have a word like that. Let's just call it apostle. Baptisma, well, hmm. We're not sure what to do with that. Let's call it baptism. How about angelus? I know, we'll call it an angel.

Roy Ciampa:         [inaudible 00:28:59] translation can be challenging. You have to just look at all the different places where translations into English just said let's punt, or let's transliterate, and then we'll give people an understanding. We'll teach and let them learn what these words means by our teaching and by their context.

Roy Ciampa:         How about [inaudible 00:29:21] translated man for generations and centuries. Then all of a sudden, we started being sensitive in the English language. Man tended to be used in a gender-specific way. So, how do we translate now? Should it be mankind? Should it be a person?

Roy Ciampa:         The King James version says don't do your good works before men. It's actually antrhopoi, or [inaudible 00:29:51] whatever. Some of the translations wrestle [inaudible 00:29:57] say don't do your good works before people. One translation says don't do your good works before others. This is the word, it doesn't mean other. They're just wrestling with how to get this idea across.

Roy Ciampa:         Maybe I'll say it. I love the ESV. I probably read it from or cite it in class more than any other. I love Dr. Paul House, the first person I ever knew here, and other people involved with the ESV. Actually, it's the ESV that goes with others, before others, as I recall. I don't have a criticism of that. It wasn't Dr. House, but some people on the ESV committee were extremely critical of the NIV or other people for making little substitutions like that. The reality is every Bible translation has to make little things that say, well, the word doesn't mean other, but the literal word to say people or person would sound awkward. This is going to communicate most clearly. I actually affirm the decision of the ESV.

Roy Ciampa:         One of my points today is, in case you haven't gotten it already, translation is complicated. We probably need to be a bit more patient with translators if we don't understand all of the dynamics they're wrestling with as they make difficult decisions about how to translate certain words. Of course, adelphoi here, traditionally translated brothers, and in some translations, translated brothers and sisters. The NIV was taken to task for translating this as brothers and sisters because they understood that the word, although masculine in gender, included both men and women in its scope. I think it's very unfortunate those kinds of attacks have taken place.

Roy Ciampa:         Ioudaios, traditionally translated Jews, but there's some strange passages in the gospel of John that talks about how the Jews were trying to [inaudible 00:31:55] kill Jesus. It's really weird because every single person in the story was a Jew. Jesus was a Jew, the Jews were Jesus' disciples, the Jews were following Jesus, and some Jews were trying to kill Jesus. How do you translate that?

Roy Ciampa:         We're going to come back to some of those questions, and some of my slides aren't in the best order. Although, maybe there's a deep, deep inner logic that I'm just not sharing with you, and you can figure that out later.

Roy Ciampa:         One of the challenges is the challenge of coordinating between agencies to avoid duplication of efforts and poor stewardship. I was part of the [inaudible 00:32:39] team of the FOBAI agencies, which is the team that tries to coordinate between various Bible translation agencies because they found out, "You know what? We're working on a translation in this language."

Roy Ciampa:         "Oh, you are? So are we. We've been working on that for 10 years."

Roy Ciampa:         "Oh, well, we've been working on that for five years."

Roy Ciampa:         "Well, maybe we should have communicated with each other so that we don't have two different translation teams trying to do the same thing, unaware of the other."

Roy Ciampa:         Then that also means having to give up some of your confidentiality of things that you're working on. That's one of the challenges today. There are dangers of hurrying and of temptation to rush. The desire to get the job done so that Jesus can come back, or to get the job done because donors want the job done quickly. Some agencies promising, "We can translate a whole Bible in a month," even though it's taking everyone else eight to 10 years.

Roy Ciampa:         I won't go into what that was all about, but there are dangers that come from trying to get it done too quickly. Work that is poor quality may lead readers to decide that scripture is incoherent or that the scripture itself is as deeply flawed as the translation because they aren't necessarily able to distinguish between the translation and the scripture.

Roy Ciampa:         I was a prison chaplain for just one year of my life before we went to Portugal as missionaries. We'd have a very generous organization come in [inaudible 00:34:09] giving away Bibles. They would come into the prison and hand out New Testaments to all of the inmates. I always urged them to use the contemporary translation, but the tendency was to give away a translation that was done in 1611. I won't mention which translation that is, but there was an English Bible translation done in 1611.

Roy Ciampa:         They would hand these out to barely literate prisoners. Then the next day, I would see the waste bins just full of these little New Testaments, and wondered to myself how many people picked up, tried to read it, and just decided, "I could never study or read or understand God's word because it's all like a foreign language to me"? Well, that can happen not just because it's 400 years old and out of date, in that sense. It can also happen if you rush through the work and don't think through all of the issues.

Roy Ciampa:         One of the challenges Bible translation faces is that it's what translation scholars, and by that I mean people translating French poetry into Japanese or other things, referred to as vulnerable translation. Vulnerable translation is the kind of translation you're doing where people that are getting the translation already think they know what it's supposed to say before they read it. You're translating the Bible for the first time into this language, but some people in that community speak Spanish, and they have a Spanish Bible. So, before they ever read the translation in the new language, they already know what the Spanish Bible says. If your Bible doesn't say exactly the same thing that their version of the Spanish Bible says, then you're going to be in for it because you're vulnerable.

Roy Ciampa:         Now, this doesn't happen if you're translating, say, some new novel in Russian, and you're translating it into Korean for the first time in a community where nobody speaks Russian. You give them the translation into Korean, and they say, "Wow, this is amazing." But when you give them a translation of something that they already know, then you as the translator are vulnerable, and so is your translation, because people will hold it up to a standard that may or may not be a fair standard for assessing a translation.

Roy Ciampa:         There's the challenge of balancing the value of accountability. Bible translators and translation agencies should be accountable, but the challenge of having every difficult decision second guessed by people on the other side of the world who aren't familiar with the linguistic and cultural issues, and maybe not be aware of how similar kinds of patterns are reflected in their own Bible translation. They assume that their translation doesn't reflect any difficult decisions that could have been second guessed, but they hear about something that a Wycliffe Bible translator is doing someplace in the other part of the world, and then suddenly, frankly, we're all experts not only on the Bible, but on linguistic issues and whatever that language is that they had never heard of before the article or the blog post was written.

Roy Ciampa:         Bible translators have to live with living in a glass house as they carry out their work in a way that's unlike anything from previous centuries. Today you could make a decision, and people all over the world could know about it and have opinions about it within a week. That's a difficult context in which to work.

Roy Ciampa:         Many of you wouldn't realize that the word kidneys ... Not the word kidneys. Do you know why I can say with authority the word kidneys does not show up in the original text of Psalm 26? Well, because it's an English word. Psalm 26 was written in Hebrew. I [inaudible 00:37:54] trained people to know these kinds of things. The word kidneys does not show up anywhere in the Bible. The word that would mean kidneys does show up in Psalm 26:2, but you won't find it there. You won't find it in a number of different places because kidneys and heart is usually translated heart and mind. I can easily see somebody doing that in the translation field and getting in trouble for it, and people back home not realizing their own Bible has heart and kidneys, which we translate as heart and mind. These are difficult issues.

Roy Ciampa:         Is Allah ever an acceptable translation for ... I don't know why there's a closed parentheses. Is it ever an acceptable translation for Elohim or for Theos? Is it ever an appropriate word to use for God? If you have a very clear, obvious answer to that, we should talk about that during our Q&A session because it isn't so easy. Actually, there isn't one simple answer [inaudible 00:38:57] this person's viewpoint.

Roy Ciampa:         The NIV and the NRSV wrestled with how to translate these words which are typically translated man or human being and son of man in Psalm 8:5. Should it be man and son of man? Should it be mankind and human being? Should it be human beings and morals? These are all actual translations, contemporary Bible translations. Should it be human race and mankind? We'll look at that in a moment.

Roy Ciampa:         Some people are concerned because--I'm not saying there's not a good reason for it--some of these change a singular into plural. Is that a problem, or is that ever acceptable? ESV, there's a video online you can read where the translators wrestle with this word, doulos, usually translated slave because it means slave. They wrestle with whether they should translate it that way or translate it bondservant, even though nobody would know what that means. They decided to translate it bondservant because they felt like the word slave was too historically, ideologically tainted. Frankly, if it weren't the ESV, if some other translation said, "We didn't want to translate it that way because in the local culture, the wording people think we should use would be ideologically and theologically tainted," that would be a big deal across international news. You following me?

Roy Ciampa:         [inaudible 00:40:26]. By the way, this is an interesting case. Psalm 32 in the Hebrew, as translated here, "Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven." These is a singular. The one whose transgressions, singular. Singular. Don't forget that, singular. Can I hear an amen?

Group:              Amen.

Roy Ciampa:         Amen.

Roy Ciampa:         Paul quotes it in Romans 4:7. "Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven." But that's a plural. I said singular. In the Greek, it's plural. The Greek translation went from singular to plural, and Paul quoted the Septuagint in the plural. Maybe I need to be a little bit more hesitant about whether or not it's always wrong to change a singular into the plural if the Septuagint does that to the Hebrew and Paul quotes it and doesn't bat an eye. Maybe, maybe not.

Roy Ciampa:         I'm going to move on. Adelphoi, NRSV says brothers and sisters. NIV says brothers and sisters. ESV says brothers, but then adds a footnote that says the plural of Greek adelphoi translated brothers refers to siblings in a family. New Testament usage depending on context [inaudible 00:41:40] mean. They mean brothers and sisters, like the net translation has it.

Roy Ciampa:         Here's Ioudaios, usually translated Jews. NRSV has the Jews. So does the ESV, and so does ... No, net translation has Jewish leaders, and so does the NIV, has Jewish leaders. But this is part of that question, it seems. Does it really mean Jew? Now, the ESV has, I think, a helpful footnote here. It says, "Or Judeans, Greek Ioudaios probably refers here to Jewish religious leaders and others under their influence at that time."

Roy Ciampa:         By the way, this is one of the escape hatches that translators sometimes use. They didn't want to translate it Jewish leaders, but we can add a footnote, and we can have our lexical or linguistic cake and eat it too. That's not a criticism of the ESV. They all do it. It's useful except in those languages where nobody will ever read a footnote, and if you're reading on an iPad or an iPhone, you're probably not reading any of the footnotes.

Roy Ciampa:         Matthew 17:15. This is one of those. An epileptic. Then down here we have epileptic. Others say have seizures. The Greek word actually has to do with the moon. It's the reason why we have those ideas of being moonstruck or a lunatic, because in that context, this was associated with the influence of the moon. So, there's the question to what extent should we bring in concepts from the modern world. We've already talked about that a little bit.

Roy Ciampa:         Key opportunities. There are opportunities thanks to unprecedented financial support. ETEN, which stands for Every Tribe, Every Nation, and others are pouring millions of dollars into Bible translation work. In the four years that I worked for American Bible Society, I make up figures like this all the time, but I would say 87.95% of all of my work was paid for by ETEN. American Bible Society would ask me to do it. I'd keep all my receipts, turn it in, and ETEN would reimburse millions of dollars for which we should be grateful. Much of that, not all, much of that coming from the Greene family, with which you may be familiar.

Roy Ciampa:         Opportunities to learn from the field of translation studies. Today the world of Bible translation has ... For many years, it's tended to be in a silo, just learning from other Bible translators. There's a whole academic interdisciplinary field called translation studies, which is making some ... find discoveries and observations about how translation works, and issues to be sensitive to and aware of. Now more and more Bible translators are being introduced to other kinds of insights drawn from this field.

Roy Ciampa:         There are opportunities today to work as [inaudible 00:44:35] checkers and advisors. I'm thinking about particularly for people from the Western world, but also, fortunately, people from around the world. Opportunities to work as translation consultants after gaining experience on an initial Bible translation project. If you show that you're gifted and quite able, there are tremendous needs.

Roy Ciampa:         The great bottleneck in Bible translation today is in the lack of people to serve in these roles, to do what's called quality control, to give that feedback and to help translation teams work through difficult issues and decide when is this translation ready to go public. There haven't been enough people as [inaudible 00:45:16] checkers, advisors, or translation consultants. If we had many more, much more work would be done more efficiently, more quickly.

Roy Ciampa:         There are opportunities to support Bible translation not only or especially Western missionaries involved in translation, which is a very worthy cause, but also national Bible societies and other Bible translators from around the world. They have fewer resources, but they are doing extremely important work in Bible translation, and greatly in need of more infrastructure, more financial support to carry that work out.

Roy Ciampa:         This is one of the agencies that I had mentioned earlier. BTL, Bible Translation Literacy, formed out of Kenya, which is a member of the Global Alliance.

Roy Ciampa:         I have more than seven minutes. That's fast. I have eight minutes, plenty of time.

Roy Ciampa:         The task is unfinished. These are languages with and without scripture. These are 683 languages that have a whole Bible; 1,500 that have a New Testament; another 1,100 that have portions of scripture; and then about 4,000 languages that really don't have anything. In terms of people, about five billion people that have scripture; another 700 million that have New Testaments; another 424 that have just portions; and 250 million without any scripture. These are the places, and basically the amount of languages in each area, 124 in the Americas, 700 languages still needing Bible translation in Africa. You get the idea.

Roy Ciampa:         My work was translating translation consultants from all over the world that would gather in Italy for training every year. Then I also worked directly with Bible translators in Angola and in the far northeast of India. In Angola, I was working with 21 translators [inaudible 00:47:35] three, so seven translation teams for seven languages in Angola that don't have the Bible in that language yet. In northeastern India, in the area called Nagaland, I was working with ... It was a team, not just me. The team was working with 21 translators, but there, they're all one person per translation team, so 21 different languages up there that didn't have God's word yet.

Roy Ciampa:         It will be a never-ending task. Some people are saying, "We can't wait until such and such year when we get it all done." Languages change. Just in English, the development from man and he to one and they, and the King James version says prevent when it means precede, and all kinds of changes in the English language and other languages. There are new linguistic discoveries made about meanings of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek words and expressions and reference.

Roy Ciampa:         I've published two articles, one on Acts 17:11 and one on 1 Corinthians 7:1, suggesting that we haven't actually understood what key Greek words mean, and those verses, so far. I'm grateful to the CSB, the ... Is that right? Yeah, the Christian Standard Bible. They took onboard my argument on 7:1, so that's the Bible I bring to church every Sunday. I don't know why anyone would bring any other Bible, but they haven't quite caught on to Acts 17:11 yet.

Roy Ciampa:         New archeological discoveries that clarify what texts are talking about. They weren't sure about a word in 1 Kings 6:31. It was talking about five-sided doors or five something about the doors. Then archeology brought up a kind of door that showed recessed door frames, and they realized, "Oh, this is a term for talking about five recessed doorframes." These are things that we learn along the way.

Roy Ciampa:         The owners of the ESV translation, right after it came out they announced they would never revise it again. It was done forever. Then, what was it? A month or so later, they said, "Our bad. Actually, this will have to go through revision. We aren't done once and forever."

Roy Ciampa:         The King James version was a revision of the Bishops' Bible, and it was revised multiple times over the centuries. Many modern translations or further revisions, including the revised version, the American standard version, the revised standard version, the NRSV, and the ESV are all part of this translation tradition. Very little translation is done from scratch today. It's more retranslation than anything else. More than one kind of translation may be needed for different audiences and purposes, different needs for young people and adults, for biblically literate and newcomers, et cetera.

Roy Ciampa:         There were one or two issues I raised along the way. I realize that it wasn't all that well-organized, but I'd be happy to take ... We have five minutes. Then you have to go to class, but if you want to skip class ... No, I didn't say that. If anyone doesn't have class, I'd be happy to chat.

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