If I send you a letter, I hope you will read it and understand what I was trying to say. When you read the letter, you read it and form an idea of what you think I was trying to say. There are three of us involved in the letter: the writer, the written and the reader. But when we think about translation, it gets quite complicated. Now in addition to the three of us, there is the translator, the translation, and the intended audience. What began as a dance of three has now turned into six of us. Finally, in the case of Bible translation, there is a seventh dancer. God himself joins in the hoe down or maybe he is the caller on the box with a fiddle under his chin watching authors and readers, translators and audiences all swirl in a country dance.
Now imagine that you like the letter I wrote you so much that you tuck it back in the envelope and you keep it ’til the day you die. A thousand years from now, creatures in strange suits, speaking a strange language are poking through the ruins of your house. As one of the creatures picks up a crumbling book, an envelope falls out. It is my letter to you. The strange creature, its curiosity aroused, tucks the letter into a pocket in its suit and thinks nothing about it again until it is relaxing that evening in the comfort of its climate controlled pod.
In order to read my letter, the curious creature takes out something that looks like a magnifying glass. As it passes the lens over the brittle paper, the words are translated into a language it can understand. Every word is translatable by the lens but the creature can’t make any sense of what is being said. People, places, inside jokes that we thought were funny. All of it sounds like so much nonsense.
What the creature does not know is that while it is puzzling over the letter, you and I are watching through the window. Our ghosts look on with longing as the creature lays the letter aside and turns its attention to another piece of paper, written by a fellow creature many light-years away. If only we could show the creature how to join in the dance.
This post was inspired by:
I am not a creature living in a pod, but sometimes feel like it when I try to read Shakespear, Henry David Thoreau, or the King James version of the Bible. Any literature that is to be meaningful to future generations should be “translated” into currently used language. I recently attended a funeral where most of those present were not Christians, and the King James was used for the readings. I felt it would have been much more meaningful to those attending if the CEV, Living, or Message was used.
As you translate the Word, realize that it will have to be updated many times in the future to keep it understandable for future generations. Looks like that is job security for Bible translators!
If I send you a letter, I hope you will read it and understand what I was trying to say. When you read the letter, you read it and form an idea of what you think I was trying to say.
Oh come on! You know we’re all too postmodern for any of that.
Or, as per the idea I’m just forming of what I’m thinking you were trying to say Dannii, I’m also just forming some ideas of what I’m thinking Lingamish was trying to say by posting about an archaic postal text. Postmodern indeed. So too I’m (rather shamelessly) trying to invite you all to begin forming ideas of some sort around my post: “An Inconvenient Truthiness”