Contextualization of Theology

These are the transcriptions of a few of the lectures from the course taught by John A. Gration, Ph.D., at Wheaton Graduate School, 1991. Used by permission of Wheaton College.

Gration Chapter 2

Contextualization and the Translation of the Scriptures

Gration: Today were looking at contextualization as it relates to translation. Here with me is Dr. Robert Litteral, who for this past year has been the scholar in residence here at the Billy Graham Center doing research and writing. Dr. Litteral is a scholar indeedhis Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvaniabut hes also a practitioner. Hes been involved in translation work for the last 25 years under Wycliffe Bible Translators serving in Papua New Guinea. About half of his time has been with the work of translation with the Angor tribe; the other half has involved teaching linguistics and training other translators, including nationals, and also serving as a consultant. Right now he and his wife are in the final stages of revising the Angor New Testament. Bob was telling me they went into this tribe in 1965, just eight years after the tribe had its first contact with Western civilization. Interestingly enough, I learn that theyve been involved in training a national who is now serving as what is called a mother tongue translator. Thats an exciting concept, to be working in partnership with a national in the area of translation. Bob, were delighted to have you here. Let me start off by asking you, what is the relationship of translation to contextualization? Litteral: Translation is really at the heart of contextualization. In translation we must take the message, Gods message, and make it meaningful in the culture of the people that we are trying to reach. We do not have anything to work with except the language itself. So all the problems that we have in contextualization making the message meaningful, making it understandable, making it clearare going to come out in translation. In translation we are working in three different cultures. Look at the model developed by Eugene Nida of the American Bible Society on the relationship between translation and these different cultures. First you see the biblical culture, which is represented as a triangle; then you see the Western culture that we come from, which is the square; and then you have the receptor culture, which is represented as a circle. That is the culture of the people who are going to be receiving the translation. In this case, the receptor culture would be the Angor; my culture is the Western; and in the biblical arena we actually have several cultures. Gration: Really? Thats an interesting concept. We always think of the biblical culture as one. You say we have several. Elaborate on that for a moment. Litteral: Yes, biblical culture is quite varied. Starting with the Old Testament, you find a nomadic group, with Abraham, a patriarch, traveling with flocks and living in tents. Thats one culture, and one way of expressing Gods revelation was used in that culture. Later you have a village-oriented culture, with the people in Israel living in villages and farming around those areas, with many of them still tending sheep as herders. Later you have yet another culture: the kingdom comes along, with a king, a new political structure, a new social structure. You have the beginning of a sort of bureaucracy, the people who work for the kingespecially later, not in Davids time. Later still came an empire, much like colonialism, with influence and domination by other cultures. Even in the New Testament there is quite a difference. Christ, on one side, is rural: the way he spoke, the things he talked about were quite different from, lets say, Paul, who was working in an urban situation primarily and in the greater Roman Empire. Gration: So this affects how we interpret even the Bible, because we have to look at its cultural context even back there. What about our Western culture? We often think were a monolithic culture. How about diversity among us? Litteral: Theres a fantastic amount of diversity among ourselves. We could look at something like theology. Within just the evangelical background there would be dispensational, theres

21

22

Contextualization and the Translation of the Scriptures

tion. But the real focus in translation is on meaning. That is, we want to get the message acrossnot word-for-word meanings, but the meaning of the whole, which is more than just the sum of individual parts. There are different ways of looking at translation. First, we have what we call formal equivalence. A formal equivalence concept of translation, which is not a very good one, is much like an interlinear Greek New Testament, where you have the Greek text and right below each word is the English as best they can translate it. The point here is to keep the words the same, focusing on the original text. The idea is if we can just keep the text more or less the same, it will be all right. I heard of a story in which a consultant back in the 1920s used to actually count the words in the Greek New Testament and encourage the translator to keep the translation into the receptor language as close as possible to the number of words in the Greek Testament! The focus is on the form and trying to keep the forms the same as much as possible. So we call that formal equivalence. At the other extreme is what well call overly free. The person says, Were not so concerned about the form of the original; we just want to get the people to respond as much as possible to the message. We really want them to understand it. We dont want them to have to be concerned about cultural problems or historical things they wouldnt know anything about. Lets just really be free and get it across the best we can. Gration: Is there an example of that particular type of translation? Litteral: Well, you may have heard of the Cotton Patch Version which was done back in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the translators tried to make the New Testament sound as if it was something that happened in the Southern U.S.A., ignoring the biblical culture and the actual historical events of the New Testament. That, I would say, would be an example of overly free translation, not giving enough consideration to the text itself. Gration: It doesnt sound as though youre overly excited about either one of these. Where do you think we ought to come down in this translation business? Litteral: The good medium would be what we call dynamic equivalence. Here we would say we want to make the meaning as equivalent as possible in the two languages. Lets say we take the New Testament, translating from Greek.

reformed, theres Anabaptist, and even varieties within those. So our Western culture is quite diverse. And we often dont realize how much our own culture has influenced the way we understand the Bible. In translation we have to be aware of our own culture and how its influencing us, so that when we put Gods message into another culture we can get rid of as many of those biases as possible. Gration: I suppose we in the West also tend to look at things from a very individualistic viewpoint without always realizing just how individualistic we are. Litteral: Thats right. Western culture is very individualistic and seems to be getting more that way, whereas other cultures are generally much more family oriented, more group oriented. I was reading this morning that in Africa they were trying to choose someone to race against another school. An American wanted to have a competition and choose the best runner. The Africans said, No, we would not do that. We will choose the runner, because if we competed with each other it would divide us and we would not be prepared to compete against other schools. They looked at it more as a group and they didnt want to hurt that unity. Gration: This brings up the fact that even in the receptor culture you find a certain element of diversity. Litteral: Thats right. First of all, there are the thousands of different cultures around the world. Even in a place like Papua New Guinea, along with a lot of similarities theres a lot of diversity. Even within the tribe or the group that were working with, the Angor, the people have different views of, lets say, what happens to the spirit after a person dies. So, even within one small tribe there can be differences of viewpoints. Gration: How does all this relate to translation? Litteral: When it comes to translation, our task is to take the message and make it as meaningful as possible in that culturethe receptor culture, as Nida calls itso that as they read the message or hear it read, they understand it as nearly as possible as the message was originally given to the people in the Bible times. Gration: If we want it to be like the Bible, why dont we just translate the Bible word for word and be really close to the original? Litteral: Some people have taken that approach at different times during the history of transla-

John A. Gration
We want to understand the Greek New Testament meaning and we want to get it as equal as possible into the language were translating intolets say, in Angor. We want the people to be able to understand it in their own language. You can say the formal equivalence method was focusing on the text itself. The overly free approach was really focusing on the audience. With dynamic equivalence we want to focus on both of them. Both of them are there to guide us as we translate. An example of that might be the Good News Bible, and I think the New International Version also tries to be dynamically equivalent. Gration: Can you give us an example of an English translation that focuses heavily on the source language, which I suppose would fit more the formal equivalency youve talked about? Litteral: All right. Lets look at something from the American Standard Version. Ill read 2 Corinthians 10:14-16, and this will give you a feeling of how difficult it is to understand even though all the words are English, when theyre sticking pretty close to the Greek. Listen to this: For we stretch not ourselves over much as though we reach not unto you, for we came even as far as unto you in the gospel of Christ, not glorifying beyond our measure, that is, in other mens labors, but having hope that as your faith groweth we shall be magnified in you according to our province unto further abundance, so as to preach the gospel even unto the parts beyond you, and not to glory in anothers province in regard to things already to our hand. You can see that is very difficult to understand. Gration: Sounds like all Greek to me, and I guess what youre saying is that thats part of the problem. In other words, I hear you saying that we cant be totally focused on the text, nor can we just focus on the audience. We really have to come up with both, dont we? Litteral: Yes. Look at the helpful chart which comes from Eugene Glassmans book on the translation debate, in which he shows this sort of relationship between these. On the left you see the formal equivalence, or correspondence, which focuses on the form of the words, and the meanings really lost or distorted, as I illustrated in that reading. On the other extreme, on the right, we have the paraphrase by addition, deletion, or changing of the message. In other words, somethings been left out, somethings been added, and its been changed so much that the message is not faithful. But in the middle are the good translations,

23

what we call dynamic equivalents. The form is restructuredthat is, the grammar, the syntax, and the lexicon or the vocabulary have been restructuredbut they preserve the meaning of the original. Gration: As a translator, what are some basic things that you always have to keep in mind? Litteral: As I talk with people about translation, we keep coming back to three things: accuracy, naturalness, and clarity. Accuracy means that the meaning must be the same between the two languages. Were not free to put our own meaning in, to add it or subtract it. We want the total meaning to be the same, as much as possible, between the two languages. Natural means that it sounds like the language sounds. That passage I read to you didnt sound like English. It was a group of English words, but it was not English. Part of it was archaic, but even its grammar wasnt English. So we want a translation to sound as much as possible the way something sounds in that language, so that it doesnt really sound like something translated, but like something thats authored or created in that language. The third point is that we want it to be clear. Many times in our experiences, lets say in working with an archaic translation, we may have to read something several times to get the meaning. With a focus on clarity we want people to be able to understand it readily. They shouldnt have to read it three or four times and say, Oh, thats what it means. So accuracy, naturalness, and clarity: all are very important. Gration: Youve given us some pretty tough guidelines. How do you really go about doing it? What are the steps that you as a translator take in achieving this kind of goal? Litteral: We look at a number of steps. First, we have to analyze the text that were translating, that is, the original. Lets look at, say, the Greek New Testament. We have to analyze it to understand what it is saying. This is where exegesis comes in. We look at the historical background, the ideas of the time, the grammar. We look at all of these together, and then we analyze the text, and we understand what the meaning is, and we get that into as simple a form as we can. Gration: So youre saying that a Bible translator must be more than just a good linguist. He really has to be a Bible student. Is that right? Litteral: Very much so. In fact, after translators have the language under their belt, a lot of their

24

Contextualization and the Translation of the Scriptures

to analyze this and see what is going on in this text, whos doing what. We talk about being saved. But Angor doesnt have a passive, so we have to analyze the grammar of the Greek and find out what all is involved. Who all is participating in this, so that we can say you are saved by grace? There is no way to make that passive. Weve got to say who did it. What we do is to say who is doing this, and we would say it is God. So we know what that part is. Grace is a noun, but what does it mean? It basically means to be gracious or to love freely. In Angor that comes across as to love for nothing, or to love freely would be a better way to do it. Then, we are the people who are saved or who escape. So it would come out something like this: God loves you freely, and God causes you to escape. Through a restructuring of this verse, an analysis of it, finding out what its component parts are, you are saved by grace comes out as God loves you freely and causes you to escape. Gration: Once again its a prime example of the fact that you really have to know the meaning in the original and then transfer that same meaning into the receptor language. In your example you almost have two sentences. Litteral: Thats right. Thats the way it has to be done in Angor. Many ways in the target language, say Angor, things that we would put as adverbs will come out verbs. So this is really becoming natural in their own language. Gration: This is interesting. Why dont you give us another example. What about the word redemption? Thats a key biblical word. Litteral: Thats one that has a lot of meaning to us, but many times we dont think of what all is involved in that. The background of that, of course, is slavery and setting someone free, buying a slave and setting him free. But what are the things involved in redemption? That is a noun in the grammar, but it has a number of component parts. Lets look at them. First, an event is involved, so we talk about setting someone free, or redeeming someone; so we can change it to a verb and say redeem. Thats the event. An object is also involved. What do you do when you redeem an object? We would say you make it free, so a quality is also involved, freedom, and thats not indicated as an adjective here. So we have God as an object. Hes doing something to another object, which is us, and hes changing the situation: theres a change in quality. So basically, it comes out as God makes us freeand thats what

time goes to the area of exegesis: really what does this mean? Much time goes into that. Gration: Where do we go from there? Weve figured out what Paul meant when he wrote to the Romans in the first century. Now were working on the Angor. Whats the next step? Litteral: The next thing we do is to transfer this meaning. In the analysis step we try to get that as simple as we can. Lets say working in English, we get that into simple form; then we transfer this meaning across into the Angor language. The transfer involves restructuring it and making the meaning come out into the structure of the Angor language. We call this restructuring. So there are the three steps. Look at the diagram of this. We start with the original text. We analyze that so weve got its underlying meaning, and that is what we transfer across. But then we have to put that into the language of the Angor. So we come back to the forms of the language, and that we call the restructuring part. Gration: In that restructuring, you must go through some process of analysis. What do you really analyze in the process? Litteral: We talk about semantic analysis. Semantics is a technical term for the analysis of meaning. We look at words and we have to discover their semantic parts. In semantics we talk about four things. We say there are objects: trees and houses, fingers and people. There are events, things that people do: we sit, we stand, we walk, we sleep. Then there are attributes or qualities: we say someone is good or we say the ball is yellow or the sky is blue. Those are attributes. Then we have relations. We add things together (and) or we say hes in the house or its on the table. These four things ordinarily come out with a one-to-one relationship in the grammar. Lets say objects often come out as nouns. Events come out as verbs. Attributes or qualities, whichever you call them, come out as adjectives. Relational things come out as prepositions (in, out) or conjunctions (and, but, although). The problem comes when this relationship is not quite so simple. Gration: When is that? It seems to me that if you have a noun in Greek to be translated, why dont you translate it as a noun where you are? Why cant you just have an equivalent translation? Litteral: Lets take one of our favorite verses. We talk about being saved by grace. We need

John A. Gration
redemption is. In Angor that would be the way it would come. Instead of saying redemption we would have to talk about God making us free. Gration: So you take a noun and turn it into an event with an attribute and an object. Is this structural or semantic analysis the only kind of analysis that you do in restructuring? Litteral: No. We need also to look at the vocabulary, at the connotations and the denotations of words, whereas before we were looking at the components and structure. Most words, probably all words, have several kinds of meaning. One is denotation: what does a word denote? Its analytical. Lets take the word woman. What does it denote? You could say a woman is an adult female. Thats analytical but it doesnt have much connotation. Now lets take a word like lady. We could say a lady is also an adult female. But the word also has positive connotations. We have warm feelings about the lady, so we say there are connotations there. Anytime were translating we have to be careful to take both denotation and connotation into consideration. Its not just getting the bare facts. What is the emotive meaning as well? Another example would be mother. For us, mother is going to have warm emotional connotations. But if we said, My female parent is living in Ohio, that doesnt have much warm connotation. Its analytical, scientific. It has correct denotation but it doesnt have the connotation, the emotional meaning. Gration: Give us an example now of how all this relates to translation. Litteral: All right. Lets look at why the word choice is very important. An example comes from John 1:11-12. As we translated that, we started off on our own. Its a very meaningful verse talking about our receiving Christ. At first we took a very prosaic approach and looked for the word receive, and we had a word for receive. If someone gives me a ball or gives me some food to eat, I receive it. So I tried that word: lets receive Christ; but that didnt even get to first base. We struck out, because you receive things, but you cant receive people. So that showed us that when translating you always have to be interacting with the people to see what a word really means to them. The next thing that came up in discussion was a word meaning to receive in your house. That basically means to house someone. It means literally to put them to the house. I thought, boy, that is good! The idea is that visitors come through and you welcome them

25

into your house and you befriend them and you take care of their needs. Its like when we go out and stay in the village; we stay in the pastors house; he would do that for us. We thought, thats it! But that wasnt quite it either. We got to discussing that and they said, Thats sort of temporary. So that didnt have quite the right connotation. Finally what the mother tongue translator came up with, which is whats been accepted, literally means you take to your skin, which means you take in a permanent relationship. This means someone becomes a part of the community. And so it comes out in Angor that to become a Christian, or to receive Christ, is to make him a part of you as if you were receiving someone into your community or into your family, as if you adopted someone. Gration: That shows the value again of having nationals work with you, and thats the very heart and essence of Wycliffes work. Let me ask you: in this instance you found the right word after you fumbled around several times, and you got the best onebut what do you do when there is no word? Litteral: Again we have to go back to the community and talk with them. The thing I would start out with is saying, by story, by explanation, this is what I want to try to get. Lets take, for example, the word God. Now, this is a big problem, especially in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, where we work, because most of those cultures do not have a concept of a supreme being. Most cultures do, but these dont. There are several ways we can approach it. The first thing I would do would be to talk with the leaders, the people, and say this is who God is. Maybe we could translate Genesis, tell them the stories of Genesis, creation, and ask, Do you have anyone like this? They said, No. So the first thing we do is look for a local term. If weve got it, thats fine. If we dont, we have to try another alternative. The second alternative is, can we create a new term or phrase? In some cases this has been done, and its strongly to be encouraged if theres no indigenous term. Some have used the creator or the supreme one or the one who lives above in heaven. But this is not the way the Angor chose to go. They chose a third alternative, what we call borrowing, and in that case they chose to use the word Got, which is borrowed from English into Pidgin English, because that is what the missions in the area

26

Contextualization and the Translation of the Scriptures

talk about communication load . Take a moment on that topic if you would. Litteral: All right. When we translate, we have to make the translation as it comes, as its read, to not come too fast with too much information packed into one little bit, or its going to be very difficult to understand. Sometimes sentences can be too long, especially with newly literate people or people who are new to reading. In Ephesians 1 Paul has a very, very long sentence. Most modern translations are going to break that up into smaller sentences so the communication load is lighter. You can read a sentence and get so much, and then go on to the next, rather than trying to go through a lot of words to hold this all together until you get to the next sentence. Gration: From what I understand, thats very key. What about actual vocabulary? Litteral: The vocabulary is also going to make a difference. We want to consider the educational level of the people that we are translating for. Some terms are going to be more difficult for people to understand than others. So we get words like teach versus instruct. Instruct is a word for a higher level of education, so its going to be more difficult for some people to understand, whereas teach is simpler. People understand it more readily. To show versus to illustrate, or to make clear versus to elucidate, or to ask versus to interrogate. If we consider the peoples level of language, their level of education, we may want to keep it simple. If were talking to, lets say, elites in America, we would maybe want to use elucidate instead of educate or use interrogate instead of ask. We want to keep the level of vocabulary so that people can understand it easily. Gration: So this is the reason why we have, even in English, various translations: because there really are different audiences in mind. Litteral: Very definitely. Something like the New English Bible is more for the more highly educated. The Good News Bible, or Todays English Version, was translated keeping in mind people who speak English as a second language, such as immigrants to America. Translations aim at their audience so they keep the information load appropriate. Gration: So we have to be careful about making comparisons, remembering that, in a sense, comparisons are odious. And we have to ask not, Is this a good translation? but, Is this new translation good for its particular audience?

are using. So they take basically an empty term that has very little meaning to them, and by stories and by communication they build meaning into it. Gration: What do they do with the word spirit? Litteral: This is one of the problems we run into. There is no generic term that covers for spirit. They have lots of names for different kinds of spirits: theres a bush spirit; theres one that lives in water holes, one that lives in caves, some that live in the sky. But theres no general term for spirit. What they came up with is a general term which means being. For evil spirits they would say bad beings. For angels they tried several thingsagain this is going back to the communityand basically they settled on a term that means Gods beings, Gods cohorts, Gods friends. Gration: Thats a beautiful way of putting it. Almost contrary to popular opinion theres even in the Greek a little ambiguity now and then; it doesnt clarify and solve all of our questions. How do you handle ambiguous terms or constructions when you get into a receptor language? Litteral: This is fascinating and this is where the challenge of translation comes. To give an example: in Angor you cant say brother. Many languages in the world are like this. That is, you have to talk about an older brother or a younger brother; theres no one term. When you look at it from the receptor language viewpoint, the Greek is ambiguous when it says James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. What kind of brother is it? Theres no word in Angor that just says brother, so we have to know if John is Jamess older brother or younger brother. The Greek doesnt tell us, but we cant leave it ambiguous. Theres no way in the language just to leave it. We have to make a choice. So what we do is to start by looking at the culture and trying to understand a little more about the New Testament. (By the way, commentaries dont help us in these cases because its not a question for Western cultures.) Basically what weve found out is that in Hebrew culture the older brother is the most important, and the names of important people are given first. So when a Gospel writer talks about James and his brother, John, we assume that James is the older because his name is mentioned first. So it comes across as James, the son of Zebedee, and his younger brother, John. Gration: Even in our English translations, if we might come back to that for a moment, we

John A. Gration
Litteral: Thats true, and it cant be emphasized enough that there is no one translation thats right and another ones wrong. We need to keep in consideration who its for and the method of translating. Gration: When we were discussing the matter of finding an appropriate word, you said you went back to the community. Maybe you could conclude by discussing briefly the role of the community or the role of the church, as it comes into existence, in translation. How important is this? What is the dynamic relationship between translation and the emerging church? Litteral: Youll see a chart that shows the church at the top with an arrow slanting down to translation, and then from translation another arrow feeding back into the church. This is a crucial part of translation that some people miss. Someone sent in a letter, I think, to Wycliffe that said, I cant go and translate, but if youll send me a dictionary, then I will translate the Scriptures for these people and give it to them. Thats a very simple idea of translation. The weakness there is that translation isnt just a one-way process. There has to be feedback. So, as I said before, were going to the community constantly to find out how they understand it. The role of translation is going to people, and they need to be actively involved. What happens, as happened in Angor, is that the translation was there, it was read, and then it went to the church. As the church grew they would preach and then they would select certain terms. For instance, at first they wanted to use a term for baptism which meant to dunk. Thats the first thing they saw: you put a person under the water. When they began to understand more what was involved with it, they looked at it more as washing because that had more ritual meaning, and so they used the word to wash. That came from the church. The translations feed into the church, giving them more understanding of what Gods Word says. Then the church itself, as it communicates that orally in discussion, selects many times an alternate way of communicating, and it feeds back into the translation. That is the crucial process.

27

Gration: So youre saying that the translation grows with the church and, in a very real sense, the church grows with the translation, so that theres a dynamic interaction. Litteral: Thats right. That is the ideal way for a translation to take place, both of them growing together. Gration: And thats why you mentioned the use of nationals as more than helpers. They are real partners. Litteral: Thats right. As I see it, the mother tongue translator, the national working with us, is the prime person, the most important person. We are helping him to understand it, but he is the most crucial one. The one that has the pencil or pen in his hand doing the translation is crucial, and if that can be a mother tongue or national translator, that is better. And of course, he is interacting with the church. He is preaching, he is discussing with them, he is hearing what they are saying, and he knows the culture much, much better than we do. So he adds a lot of richness to the translation. We are not only helping him to translate, but we are also developing a person, a leader. Gration: Youve been devoting a good part of your time, apparently, to developing these mother tongue translators. It must be a very rich and rewarding experience to see them begin to emerge and do some of the things you were trained to do. Litteral: Yes. Probably the primary task of us expatriates is enabling the people there to do the task that formerly we did, because they can do it better. And we also want to be building the community. That is where most of my efforts are going now. Gration: Thank you, Dr. Litteral. Certainly translation is the epitome and the essence of contextualization. Im sure weve all sensed that its an exciting and a rewarding field of ministry to make Gods living Word available and understandable to a people for the first time. Im sure we have sensed also that its not an easy task but a privileged one, and we thank you, Dr. Litteral, for this time thats been very insightful and informative and also inspiring.