Episode 54: Gained in Translation
What can decades of experience translating the Bible and an old episode of a campy British sci-fi show teach us about arguing in the church?
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Shownotes
We’ll be ending this season with an episode on the book Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes. Pick up your copy today. (Link supports Christian Civics.)
Andy Crouch discusses authority and vulnerability in this video.
Transcript
Introduction
For a very specific group of people, one of the biggest news stories of the past week was that Russel T. Davies is gonna be returning as the behind-the-scenes boss of the British science fiction show Doctor Who. He’ll be taking over the show again in 2023, just in time for its 60th anniversary, but way back in 2006, the last time he was in charge of the show, there was an episode where our hero, a charming, ageless, time-travelling adventurer called The Doctor, who is very kind but also more than a little arrogant, chases a monster through time back into the past. And while he's in the past looking for the monster, he tries to find some clues by reading the mind of one of the people the monster had terrorized. So our hero explains to this woman that he’s opening up a door into her mind, but as he’s walking around inside her memories, he realizes that she’s doing the same thing to him. That’s something that hadn’t ever happened to him before. And when he asks her how she did it, she tells him, “A door once opened can be stepped through in either direction.”
I was thinking about that line a bit as I was helping to edit this week’s interview. Our guest is professor and Bible translator Dr. Doug Trick. Dr. Trick is a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators of Canada. He worked for 25 years doing Bible translation work in Asia, mostly for people-groups that didn’t have any scripture in their native language. Since 2006, around the time that episode of Doctor Who was airing, Doug has been teaching Bible translation courses at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, where he leads the faculty team and oversees various degree programs.
I’ll be honest with you: out of all the conversations I’ve had for this podcast so far, this ended up being one of my favorites, which makes perfect sense, given my background in creative writing and speech writing, and my interest in missionary theology. Dr. Trick’s primary research interest is philosophy of language, and especially the nature of translation. He’s spent years and years learning about how God communicates with us and how we can communicate effectively with each other in light of our faith.
One of the things that you’ll hear him talk about today is the fact that, over the course of his career, he’s realized that if he wants to be able to share the gospel with someone, if he wants to be able to introduce a new way of thinking to them, he has to get to know them very, very well first. Winning people over isn’t just a matter of swooping in and giving them information that he has but they don’t. Translating the Bible for the people he’s reaching out to isn’t so much sending them a letter as it is…opening up a door and walking into their lives.
After the interview, we’ll talk a little more about how Dr. Trick’s experiences can help us deal with polarization in our churches and in our cities, but first, we’re going to jump into my conversation with Dr. Trick right as I asked him how his work as a Bible translator has changed the way he relates to scripture
Interview
Doug: So there's this occupational hazard where, when I look at scripture, I'm thinking, “Is this a good translation?” Or when I hear preachers, critiquing a particular translation decision, I'm not thinking about the big picture of what the preacher is communicating. I’m thinking about the technical issues of translation. There is that negative or sort of dark side of it.
The other thing that has happened: When I was involved in Bible translation in the field, I was really thinking almost entirely about that particular translation project. I wasn't really reflecting as much on the nature of translation and the nature of language and communication. Now that I've been teaching translation these 15 years, I've become much more reflective about the nature and the process itself, and I've become much more aware of the limitation of human language. Human language is a wonderful gift from God that enables us to communicate with one another and it's the basis for nurturing relationships. But it's very slippery. Human language is so imprecise. And variable! The idea that what I'm experiencing right now is being communicated to you without any slippage? Is just a very naive understanding of the way language works.
But God is not limited by that. God can communicate his heart to us even using the imperfections of human language.
Rick: Early on in my Christian life, I was at a Christian bookstore and a book on one of the shelves caught my eye. I don't remember the list of everything the author was complaining about, but one of the things was the, “steady parade of new translations instead of the time-tested God honoring king James version.” What would you say to someone who complaints that we have too many translations? There's the old joke that “the king James was good enough for Jesus, so it's good enough for me.”
Doug: That's really a big topic and I can touch on a few ideas with respect to it. One is that we have to recognize there never is any perfect translation, just like there's no perfect communication of any type. Even between my wife and I, and we've been married 43 years! There's never any perfect communication whereby something that I'm experiencing can be fully and totally, without any loss, be experienced by somebody that I'm in communication with.
Rick: Many times my wife and I have gotten mad at each other and realized, “I just want you to read my mind!”
Doug: Exactly! So, if communication is never perfect between two people who know each other very intimately, why would we expect there to be perfect communication when a message was communicated 2,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago on the other side of the world in a vastly different cultural situation? There's going to be a certain amount of slippage.
So, something’s always lost in translation. But the reality is there can be also amazing gain in translation. You and I are having a conversation now. I can't express my thoughts to you perfectly, but what I am doing is a hundred percent better than if you and I were not talking at all. Even though perfect communication is not possible, God has ordained our world and our lives in such a way that there can be a very high degree of relationship-building and communication between individuals. Of course, it's limited if they speak different languages, but that can be overcome by incarnational relationship-building, learning one another's language and cultural system and so on.
The recognition that there is no perfect translation does not invalidate the translation process at all. There’s no perfect communication, yet we do communicate. Anybody who's listening to this now is assuming that communication, to some degree, is possible or they wouldn't be listening.
Another observation is the fact that languages change. Language has changed. King James English is different from 21st century English. British English is different from American English and different from Australian English. Languages are different across time and across geography.
Language is always shaped by the particular speech community. Whenever we're interacting with one another, we're influencing each other’s experience of using language. As we go on through life, we're hearing things that are new or novel expressions. We're picking them up. We're hearing old expressions used in new ways, and we begin to do the same thing. And so language is a living kind of thing. It's not static, something that we can easily draw a very fixed boundary around and say, “Okay, so this is the language. This translation was done a hundred years ago. This is the year to do a new translation.” If we're thinking about a translation for a particular people-group, we think, “What about this other neighboring people-group across the mountain? Can they use the same translation or do they need a different one?”
All of these issues are very fluid and very dynamic. And the need for different translations is not a precise determination. But there are some principles that we follow when we're making decisions about whether or not a translation is needed for a particular people-group or a revision is needed at a particular time.
Having said all that, I would also suggest that those who are a little bit concerned about the plethora of English translations—there's just hundreds and hundreds of them! Almost every year, there's a new one that comes out. I think it is a valid concern that we, who speak English, particularly north American English, we are just really overfed by translations.
Although, I would also point out though that some publishing houses that prepare and distribute new translations are very systematic in using some of their profits to support ongoing scripture work, translation, and distribution among more marginalized people-groups around the world. So it is a very complicated situation.
Rick: I have probably four questions off of everything you just said! First, just on the most personal level, you had mentioned at the top of the interview that you went into translation work rather than pastoral work because you're a little bit more introverted. You weren't sure you wanted to spend that much time on the front lines with people. But you just talked about the importance of being incarnate within a particular group of people for a translator to be able to do their work well. How has that desire to be a behind-the-scenes ended up playing out for you since you now realize it's important to be among the people you're translating for?
Doug: It was quite an eye-opener to me. My first assumption was based on a rather static view of the nature of language and an assumption that once you've learned a language, you can isolate yourself in your office where you're comfortable as an introvert and work on the translation hidden away from the realities of life and the messiness of relationships. But in fact, that's that doesn't work.
It's interesting because many people who are drawn to work in Bible translation come with an assumption that being an introvert is a good thing, because it's a very meticulous process and it needs a lot of concentration. And a certain amount of time that can be spent alone, but really language learning doesn't take place in an office. It takes place in a community, when you're out among people and interacting with them.
And in many cases, if a particular people-group doesn't have scripture, they may not even have a group of believers among them. So they're being exposed to a totally new message. And if you expect a people-group to adopt a new message from somebody that they have no relationship with, that's very naive, too.
So it's actually something that I've had to work on all my life, to intentionally spend more time getting out in the community, interacting with people there. There are some stages of translation projects where we do need to test the translation in the community and get people's feedback, and those force you into it. But beyond that, there were many times when I just said, “I need to go sit under the tree and visit with people,” even though that wasn't my first choice of what to do.
Rick: You talked about things that get lost in translation. The longer I'm a Christian and the more I engage with translator notes and commentaries and read various different translations within my own native language, the greater appreciation I have for the fact that the translators aren't just trying to figure out how to match vocabulary for vocabulary and grammar for grammar, but that there is actually also a gulf between the conceptual world I live in and the conceptual world that these texts were written in. Ancient Hebrew? First-century Greek? Those aren't just different sets of vocabulary with different grammatical rules. Those derive from completely different ways of understanding what the world is and what a person's relationship to the world is, or what a person's role within the world might be. It's not just different words for the same thing.
So you do a lot of work not just translating these ancient conceptual worlds to your own current one, you're trying to translate these ancient, conceptual worlds for a contemporary conceptual world that you are not native to.
Doug: Those are really crucial issues related to the whole translation process, and I really appreciate that you've brought this up! Especially in North America where so many people are largely monolingual, they experience all of life with one single framework. Maybe they know a little bit of a couple of other languages, but largely many of us are monolingual.
Before I became involved at all in translation work, I grew up essentially monolingual. And my view was, using a bit of a metaphor, to think about the nature of a dictionary. We've got a dictionary that's got maybe 5,000 or 10,000 head words. And for each head word, it gives a a definition of what that word might mean. Now, what I thought before I went into translation was that, if we're working in another language, what we would do with this dictionary is we would just leave all those descriptions in place and plug in different labels for them. But in fact, that just doesn't work. It's not just the labels that are different. It's the actual conceptual categories themselves that are different.
So that's why to do a good Bible translation requires and incarnational kind of experience. To whatever degree we're able to, we’ve got to understand the original context. When Paul was writing or Jeremiah was writing, they were addressing certain audiences who had all sorts of understandings of the words that were being used, as well as the larger context in which they were living and the issues that were being addressed. So, first of all, we need to try to get ourselves back there.
But as you pointed out, we also try to get ourselves immersed and embedded in the cultural situation for the audience that we're doing a translation for. A good translation project always includes people who are as highly fluent as possible in the source text, as well as as highly fluent as possible in the receptor language, in the target language. A translation team usually involves several people who are native speakers of the host language, as well as people who are familiar with the scriptures. And sometimes there's actually gain when we're thinking about these kinds of dynamics.
So when we think of shame, for example, many people are familiar with the Asian idea of losing face. We may have the word “shame” in English that we try to attach to that, but many of us know that there is not a good map at all between our experience of shame and what many Asians experience. Of course they have a different word for it, but they also have a vastly different experience of it. In actual fact, in many situations, the emotional and social experience that Asians have maps much more closely to the experience, as we can best understand it, described by people in scripture when they were experiencing shame.
Hospitality is another example. We think of hospitality as something like taking somebody out for a meal, and in most cases it doesn't really cost us anything. We pay for it, but it's not setting us back. It's not taking our month's rent away from us. Hospitality in the scriptures is often a much, much more costly thing—but people [in scripture] never thought about it as costly. It was just the thing you do.
So there's these different experiences, different conceptual categories in our Western world which don't map very well to scripture. But in fact, they map quite well to some of the marginalized people-groups among whom we're working. So that's what I think about when I say sometimes there's sort of a gain in translation.
Rick: And we assume that scripture was written purely as a transmission of factual denotations word-by-word. We assume that scripture was written to be all content and no form. But as someone whose background, before going into politics, was in creative writing, who went to a fiction writing conservatory for college, the form in which something is written is part of the meaning! Robert Alter's commentary on his translation of the Old Testament points out that a lot of books of the Old Testament were written in language that isn't just ancient Hebrew, but in Hebrew that was stylized even for the time. And there are books that are in recognizable common literary forms or literary or poetic structures that were common at the time, but not longer in use. The form was actually part of the meaning!
When we were prepping for this, I talked about how God chose to only give us 10 sentences written down on stone tablets that are direct instructions with simple meanings word-by-word. Other than that, we have (depending on how your book is printed) 1,000 to 2,000 pages of scripture that he chose to give us by inspiring particular authors in particular times and places to use their contemporary literary devices and forms. As a translator, how do you account for that? How do you account for the fact that you're not just trying to figure out what the words mean, but you're trying to figure out what effect the way the words were delivered is supposed to provoke? Or what deeper meaning is there embedded in the structure of the poem?
I know plenty of times people have talked to me about Psalms as though the Psalms are modern technical writing, while ignoring the poetic structure. What do you think gets lost when we get so focused on explaining what individual words or sentences mean in a denotative way that we neglect to pay attention to how a poem or a story or a letter was presented stylistically or formally?
Doug: A lot of those notions about a compositional view of language, where the meaning of a sentence is equal to the sum of the meanings of the words in the sentences, that kind of an assumption (I don't know of anybody who's actually ever said that [so plainly], but it is an assumption that is largely held and unquestioned by many people), I think it's partly a consequence of being largely monolingual and also a consequence of a highly literate society. One of the unintended consequences of literacy among us is that, because we have the capacity to look at each individual word and take them apart, look at their own internal composition, and we can do that with clauses and sentences and paragraphs and so on, we tend to bring that over that assumption to the way language is. Yet it flies in the face of the way that we communicate with one another. You can get away with that assumption of language working that way if you're monolingual, but once you begin experiencing life in two or three totally different languages and cultural worldviews, you realize that the mapping from one word in one language to a particular word in another language totally breaks down.
So then when you reflect back on the original message that was communicated, is it really as compositional as we've always been assuming? If somebody says to me, “This podcast is in incredibly boring,” I'm not focusing on the dictionary meanings of the words, “podcast” and, “incredible” and, “boring.” I'm focusing on, “What is that person saying about my identity? How does that impact me? How do I feel about myself and how is it an expression of my relationship with that person and what can I do to avoid provoking that experience in others? So when we're using language, we're not thinking about the meanings of each word, we're thinking about their impact on one another. We're thinking about how it’s influencing my relationship with people. All of these other things. That's really what languaging is all about. Focusing on the meanings of words and trying to replicate those meanings? That’s a drop in the bucket of actual language experience—but it tends to receive almost a hundred percent of the attention.
Rick: Bearing all of this in mind, how do we let the Bible shape our morality, shape our moral universe, interact with it devotionally and really grasp the fullness of what scripture is, or is trying to be, without needing to also become linguists? Without needing to spend the vast majority of our time learning other languages and reading academic papers on the translation process, comparing your work to the works of your colleagues? How do we as English speakers interact with scripture in ways that are spiritually productive without being spiritually thin?
Doug: That's a question that we all face. We all want to hear from God and we want to hear as clearly as we can. Let me go back to what I had mentioned a little bit earlier: Some people throw up their hands in despair and say translation is impossible because they recognize there is no such thing as a perfect translation. And my response to that would be, Well, then you’d need to throw up your hands in despair that all communication is impossible because there's no such thing as perfect communication. But our experience, our human experience, is that we can have very rich communication with one another. And we can be very thankful for whatever degree of communication and relationship-building we are able to experience, even across the huge distance of geography and time.
And also the reality is this is God's revelation of himself. God is holy. He's totally outside of his creation. He's perfect. He's sinless. We are sinful. We are finite. So there's all of these huge gaps between who God is and who we are. We can throw up our hands in despair and say, it's impossible for us to hear from God. And yet that's part of who God is. Part of his sovereignty and his omnipotence is that he can take a broken people and he can take broken tools like human language, which are corrupt and not perfect, and he can still communicate to us.
Reflection
If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more from Dr. Trick, I’ve got good news for you: We talked for close to an hour, and I had to cut a lot of that to keep this episode from taking over the rest of your day. BUT there are gonna be a couple ways you can hear more:
First, just subscribe and keep listening. In a few weeks, we’re gonna run a book club episode where we discuss the book Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes. That episode’s gonna include some of the cut content from my conversation with Dr. Trick, since it’s pretty relevant to some of the questions that book raises.
Next, we haven’t done a bonus episode of the podcast in a while, and I think a more complete recording of this interview would make a good bonus episode. So, if you’ve made a donation to our ministry in the past couple of years, I’ll get that bonus episode sent your way later this fall.
Now, I mentioned at the top of the episode that this interview got me thinking about how communicating with someone and convincing them of something requires some degree of reciprocity, some degree of not just authority, but of mutual trust and maybe even mutual vulnerability. Andy Crouch a few years ago was making the rounds on podcasts and blogs talking about how flourishing only happens when people simultaneously experience authority and vulnerability. If there’s a relationship where one side has the authority and the other has the vulnerability, then that’s a relationship where one side has control and the other side will suffer. Even if they have their material needs met, they’ll still end up in a position where their spirit will suffer. And he says that our goal as Christians is to promote flourishing, not cause suffering or amass control.
Dr. Trick highlighted how this works when it specifically comes to Bible translation. To translate the Bible for a particular group of people, his team has to be fully incarnate in the life of their audience. They can’t just rely on learning the language from afar, or in an academic setting, they have to see and experience and understand how that language is actually used in practice. They have to learn how to inhabit the world that produced the language. If they don’t, they’re probably going to end up talking past the people they’re trying to reach, using words that seem familiar in ways that their neighbors would never actually claim or understand.
This happens all the time in US politics. People try to learn about their political opponents by proxy. We read articles about what our opponents think and why they’re wrong. We go down rabbit holes on Twitter or Reddit reading the dumbest things people on the other side have said. There are even plenty of entertainment outlets that go around with cameras asking people questions at rallies or protests until they get a particularly frustrating or absurd answer, and then those are the clips they share.
The end result is, even if we are using the same words as our political opponents, we’re almost never really talking about the same thing. We’re using the same headwords, but our definitions are completely different.
In the US, this is the pattern of the world right now when it comes to political polarization. And, unfortunately, this is also the pattern of the CHURCH in the US writ large when it comes to political polarization. It makes it hard for we the people to have a coherent conversation, and it makes it almost impossible for our government to function the way its supposed to.
For most people, I don’t really see a way out of this impasse right now. The platforms and systems and institutions that mediate our conversations with one another are stuck in this model for the time being, and there aren’t many options for learning to think, speak and act differently.
But the church CAN be that. The church CAN be a place where we figure out another way of talking to one another. If we’re patient. And if we’re humble.
Because the church gives people on the left and people on the right a place to start finding a common vocabulary and a common vision and a common trusted mediator. Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and eventual return gives us a way to start talking with one another, a shared vocabulary to start understanding one another, and a reason to want to do it in the first place.
If you want to get better at this, if you want to connect with other Christians from around the country and across the political spectrum who all want to see the church do better for the sake of being an agent of healing in our country, you should go to our website, ChristianCivics.org, and go to the Upcoming Events section and sign up for our next Christian Civics Foundations cohort. It starts on October 19, and it runs for six weeks, and it’ll be an amazing opportunity to challenge, and encourage, and grow alongside Christians who share your faith but not your politics.
Prayer
King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Ever-Loving Father,
You’ve bound us together in Christ, man and woman, Jew and Greek, children of natives and children of migrants, Democrat and Republican and Independent. We know that we will all praise you together when the kingdom comes. We’ll stand shoulder to shoulder and sing your praises in different languages and the fact that we’re doing it in your Spirit will make it harmony instead of caucophany.
But practicing that now isn’t easy. And in this moment when each American lives in their own, unique universe of information and the people on the left and the people on the right mostly learn about one another from people who want to make us angry or dismissive or afraid, looking forward to this aspect of your kingdom is maybe harder than its ever been.
I confess that I too often take comfort in the promise of justice and punishment when I should be praying for humility for myself and repentance and comfort for others. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Thank you for the decades of experience you’ve given Dr. Trick in learning how your word works and how sharing your heart with others works. We face the temptation to silo ourselves off from one another in the church, to set up different family tables in different rooms of your house. And even when we do gather around a single table together, we find it hard to relate to one another. But you call anyone who finds ourselves in Christ to be part of a new people, so we want to try. As we argue with one another, persuade one another, remind us of Dr. Trick’s experience. Just as you saved us by making yourself painfully vulnerable to us, and as Dr. Trick has learned to view translation and evangelism more like a relationship than like a debate, teach us to encourage and comfort one another, not just argue. Or, at least when we do argue, teach us to do so in love and in good faith.
We pray these things in the name of Jesus, who could surely find plenty to argue with in all of us, but still chose to go to death for us, even death on a cross.
Amen.