“That Explains It!”

By Lynn Silvernale

WORD Ministries: ABWE's International Translation, Literacy, and ESL Ministries

A key focus of missions today is to partner with national believers, equipping and encouraging them as they become leaders in the ministry. ABWE's new WORD Ministries is especially concerned with equipping nationals to do the work of Bible and literature translation and literacy teaching, both of which are vital to our main objective, church planting. How do you win people to Christ and establish growing churches without the Word of God in their language? Or what do you do when you have the Word of God in the local language, but the people you are working with have never learned to read? Or what if you have people who can read, but no literature to give them to further their Christian growth? No Sunday school lessons for the new church to teach its children? No tracts to use for evangelism?

Translation and literacy programs are vital to the global church-planting effort, but they involve activities that missionaries are not able to do alone. Only mother-tongue speakers of the local language are able to do a satisfactory job of translating the Bible and other Christian material into their language. They are essential partners in translation and literacy projects. WORD Ministries comes alongside to give on-site training in translation practice and principles and in how to check a translation, so that the national translators and reviewers are equipped to do their job. We are available to work with nationals in constructing literacy primers in their language and then teaching them how to use those materials to teach others. In this way, we prepare them to be laborers together with us and with God in planting, watering, and reaping the harvest. As they do their job of translating, pastors and Christian teachers are being equipped with the life-giving word of truth which enables them to do their work. In the words of one national pastor when he first held in his hand a copy of the New Testament in his language: “Now we have no more excuse for not obeying God's commands. Now we can read and understand them.”

Translating for Meaning

It is usually impossible to translate idioms (unique cultural expressions) from one language to another, so often the translator has to simply express the sense of the idiom. Occasionally the language happens to have an idiom which expresses the same meaning. At a recent training session for national translators, I gave Deuteronomy 23:3 as an example. The Hebrew original of this verse says that no Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord “even down to the tenth generation.” I had always understood this to mean that after the tenth generation those people could enter the assembly. However, when we were translating this verse our Hebrew scholar explained that “tenth generation” is a Hebrew idiom which means “forever.” So the verse really says that no Ammonite or Moabite can ever enter the assembly of the Lord. We could have translated it as an explanation, but our national partners showed us a similar idiom in their language; “fourteenth generation,” which also has the meaning of “forever.” So we used “fourteenth generation” to translate this verse, in order to convey the correct meaning. When I finished explaining this, one translator suddenly burst out, “That explains it!” with an expression of amazement on his face. Then he told us about his Muslim neighbor who has come several times to his house to discuss or argue about the Bible. This man had asked our translator about this verse, “Why does this version say, ‘tenth generation' and that one says ‘fourteenth generation?' If it's tenth it can't be fourteenth, or if it's fourteenth it can't be tenth.” The translator had not been able to give the man an explanation, so he was delighted to finally hear one. He couldn't wait to get home in order to give his friend the answer to his question.

Read more about WORD Ministries here .

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