The Truth About Translation

Recently several serious accusations against Wycliffe have been spreading around the internet.  Although they are difficult and sensitive in nature, a colleague of mine from Tanzania wrote a good response and I will share it here.

 The accusation: “Western missions agencies Wycliffe, Frontiers and SIL are producing Bibles that remove Father, Son and Son of God because these terms are offensive to Muslims.” This has also morphed into a new accusation: “Bible translators are replacing God the Father with ‘allah’.”

The truth: Those words are not removed. In certain contexts, certain familial terms in Arabic may implicitly mean that God the Father had sex with Mary, and Jesus the Son was the offspring of intercourse. That ‘implicit information’ is not there in the Greek and Hebrew words, so care must be used to choose the right Arabic words that don’t imply that God and Mary had sexual intercourse. A translation that implies that they did would be an inaccurate translation. Wycliffe and SIL are 100% committed to orthodox Christianity, belief in the Trinity, belief in God the Father and Jesus His Son, and are always fully committed to translating those words accurately into whatever languages with which they are working. Regarding the use of the word ‘allah’, ‘allah’ is simply the Arabic word that means ‘god’. It is an Arabic word, not an Islamic word. Almost any religion in Arabic is going to use the word ‘allah’ for ‘god’, not just Islam, just as in English many religions use the word ‘god’.

Bible translators have to make decisions all the time on how best to translate words, phrases, and whole discourses, and these decisions are usually made in consultation with the community and a number of experts and consultants, not in isolation. These decisions range from types of boats, to names of God, from how a language can talk about loaves of bread, to the bread of life; and the processes for making these decisions are generally the same. Concerned Christians pick up on some of these themes, and unfortunately the discussion moves to the character of the translators, rather than a discussion about translation methodology.

The repercussion of this is that some in the Christian community are questioning whether or not to continue supporting Wycliffe missionaries. One of our friends commented on our Facebook discussion that her family “lives in a Muslim country where the word for ‘god’ or God is also Allah. A supporting church many years ago saw this and actually retracted their support, sending us a tract about how ‘Allah has no son.’” Regardless, our friend was able to explain to the people of their village who ‘Allah’ (God) really is, the creator God who sent his Son to die for them.

But now language communities that are waiting to hear God’s Word in their own language for the first time will have to wait even longer, as missionaries and projects struggle to maintain necessary support levels for their work. It is also heartbreaking that it is fellow Christians, and not the secular world, who are sensationalising this issue, rather than giving Bible translators the benefit of the doubt and opportunity to explain their decisions. One such website that is posting article after article on this topic is dailyjot.com. I decided to write an email to the author of the site, and I’ve reproduced the email below for you to read.

Hi Bill,

A friend pointed me to your site to get my opinion about your articles on the growing controversy surrounding some of Wycliffe’s Bible translations. I myself am a Wycliffe translator, working in East Africa, so I’m familiar with the type of issues surrounding translation, although not the specific issues regarding translating in a Middle Eastern context. So here are a few of my thoughts on the matter.

This situation reminds me a bit of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, where Peter and Susan are confused by Lucy’s comments about there being a world inside the wardrobe, and the Professor’s response to them is something like, Is Lucy known for being a liar? Since she’s not, perhaps give her the benefit of the doubt, based on her character until you find out more about it.

Translation is one of those issues that is incredibly complex, and yet touches something that is very close to all of us – language. It must consider socio-linguistic issues, as well as purely linguistic ones. The translator must be able to differentiate style, focus, register, collocation, impact, genre, figures of speech, idioms, and various other parts of discourse of both the source language and target language – parts of discourse in which most language-speakers are subconsciously competent, but of which are consciously unaware.

Wycliffe, as an organisation of people translating the Bible into languages in need, has been doing so for some 70 years, and as you said, “The reputation of Wycliffe up until now has not been in question (The Daily Jot: Wycliffe response raises more questions about the name of God).”

Based on such a character reference, I would hope that the Christian community’s first response to a controversy surrounding Wycliffe’s translation methods would be one of patience and grace, giving the 70-year old organisation the benefit of the doubt. Does Lucy often lie? Does she often make up stories that aren’t true? And in this case, are Wycliffe translators prone to manipulating translations? Do Wycliffe translators often try to appease other religions at the expense of the gospel of the only true God, Yahweh? Are they a wicked, degenerate people, trying to subvert the glory of God and replace the gospel with a false, hell-bound gospel? Or perhaps could there be another explanation?

Based on what I know of most Wycliffe translators, they are generally people who have seen the desperation of the Great Commission, and have given up their way of life and chance to ‘get ahead’ so that less fortunate people can come to know Jesus, and how He wants to save them from their own sins.

If it sounds incredibly strange that such people would replace Yahweh with the god of Islam, or any other religion, then perhaps there’s more to it. But instead of giving Wycliffe translators the benefit of the doubt and engaging in reasonable, inquisitive discussions to understand more about the issues, people are up in arms, crying foul, and implying that Bible translators have “succumbed to the religion of the antichrist.”

Other than this being inflammatory and unhelpful, the sad repercussion is that many of Wycliffe’s supporters are hearing incomplete and uniformed fragments of the issues, and having second thoughts about where they want to put their support. Ultimately this means that people all over the world who are still waiting for God’s Word in their language, will have to wait longer.