The qualities of a good Bible translation form a four-sided triangle. The basic characteristics are accuracy, naturalness and clarity. This means accurately representing the meaning of the original text using natural language in a way that clearly communicates. The fourth side of the triangle is acceptability. If a translation is not acceptable then it doesn’t matter how accurate or natural it is. I know it’s not logical but acceptability never is. This reduction of the complexities of translation masks many of the issues that cause translators to pull their hair out. How can we be accurate when the commentators don’t always agree on the meaning of a particular passage? How can we know what Jesus intended by a parable when the cultural distance is so vast and the corroborating data is so slim. When we started working on the Nyungwe translation our method was a bit like teaching a child to catch by surrounding him with people all throwing balls at him from different angles. We compared the Greek. We compared the Chichewa. And the Shona. We compared four different versions of the Bible in Portuguese. With all these translations in mind we tried to have an idea of what the general consensus was about the meaning of this passage and then express it in passable Nyungwe. Then my job was to look at the Nyungwe and see if it accurately reflected the meaning of the original text. This was confusing. And while on the surface the translation often looked quite similar to the original I didn’t know if the translation would be in the least bit clear to the average speaker of Nyungwe. This was a controversial point. Some theorists said that a Bible translation should only be meaningful to people who already knew the Bible through another language. If the Bible was understandable to pastors then they could explain it to their congregations. There were others who said that the purpose of a Bible translation was to be understandable to the uninitiated listener. The uninitiated listener was symbolized by a little old lady living in a village. Would she be able to understand what the Bible was saying, even without the benefit of preexisting Biblical knowledge?

Another thing that shifted quite regularly was our translation method. The first draft of the Gospel of Luke had been produced by Branco recording himself reading the Boa Nova Good News translation in Portuguese and then interpreting it on the fly into Nyungwe. This method was so easy that he actually recorded the entire Bible this way. The problems were many, however. Once the interpretations were transcribed, typed up and checked by a translation consultant it was discovered that they weren’t very accurate or natural. Branco had been outside of the Nyungwe speaking area for almost two decades. He used words like Mwari for God (the Shona term). We spent so much time cleaning up that text and comparing it to eight different translations (I wasn’t a Greek expert at that stage… ) that it would have been much faster to just start from scratch. Which brings up the first law of shortcuts: They’re not.

We also tried retelling which was a method I heard about in the journal The Bible Translator. This involved having the translator read a passage in another language and then retell it in their heart language. This doesn’t work. At least the way we did it. Because Mozambicans have fabulous memories. Lourenço just read the passage once in Portuguese. Looked at it really hard for about fifteen seconds and then rattled off an essentially word for word translation in Nyungwe complete with the stilted sentence structure of the Portuguese. I also tried to have the translators work separately, swap translations, correct each others work, and move on. This was going to be a much more efficient use of our time than just having one translator type while the other watched. Wrong. I was setting them up to criticize each other and that’s a no-no in this culture. And plus, Africans like to work together. In fact, put an African in a room by himself for the day and he will curl up and die. Or at least not get very much done. The sweet spot for translators is a team of three. One is in charge. Two is a people person. And Three is the one that gets picked on by One and Two. If you put two translators in a room together they’ll tear each other’s throats out. But with Three in there, One and Two are able to balance out their egos and also incorporate each other’s advice without losing face.

After much trial and much error we settled on the Almeida translation in Portuguese as our base text. It had an important similarity with the Greek. It was almost incomprehensible. But it was well-loved by the churches in Mozambique and it was so literal that it many places the word order was identical. Having one translation as our base, even a really archaic European language translation was far superior to the room full of barking dogs that we had previously. Now we had just one big dog to try to listen to and figure out what it was saying.

The other side of the equation was the naturalness of the language in the Nyungwe translation. Since I hadn’t done any linguistic study I didn’t have any way of telling if the translation being produced was natural or not other than asking the translators, “So, is this natural language?” To which they would always respond, “Yes.” We also had a reviewers committee that met several times a month and they were a lot of fun. And they enjoyed getting together, drinking Cokes and reading through the translation we produced. I remember one member, Marizane. I showed him the first translation we had produced up to this point. You have to understand that Marizane played Jesus in the Jesus Film so his opinion mattered. I remember handing him a piece of paper with some Nyungwe Scripture on it and asking him what he thought. Angels hushed their singing. The traffic on the road stopped. This was the biggest moment of my translation career and in fact the moment I had fantasized about for more than a decade. Marizane read the page and then began to rub his eyes like he was having trouble reading the words. I realized that he was crying. He looked up at me from reading the page and said, “Now God speaks my language!” We hugged. Angels broke into a chorus. And little old ladies praying over our newsletter back in Oregon knew in their knower that God had heard their prayers.

Actually, what happened is Marizane read the translation for a few seconds, paused, looked up at me and said, “Está.” The word está in Portuguese means “it is.” And it’s not even “it is” in a sort of definitive way like “It is THE WORD OF GOD!!!” It’s more like “It is right now but tomorrow it might not be.” So this was quite a letdown. It would not sound good in a newsletter to our supporters back home. I would not be featured in a Wycliffe Bible Translators promotional magazine any time soon: “Nyungwe man says Bible is…sort of.”

The best thing we did for the Bible translation was stop translating and start studying Nyungwe. For three weeks, the translators and three other guys met together every day and wrote stories. They interviewed little old ladies. They recorded folktales and cataloged proverbs. I’m still studying the data we collected in those three weeks. We collected so much interesting stuff that a theoretical linguist could have overturned any wild theory out there. I learned more about Nyungwe culture and values and sense of humor through that brief study than I could possibly process in a lifetime. One thing I learned is that proverbs mean anything. One of my favorites was, Luwiro la muncenga nkhuyambira pabodzi, “To run in the sand you must all begin together.” Nobody could agree on what this meant. But the explanations taught me so much Nyungwe language and culture that it didn’t matter.

After only a short while I started to notice that the language I was hearing in the recordings of native speakers didn’t sound anything like the language that was in our translation. For one thing, I hardly ever heard ndipo. Our Bible translation had the word ndipo at the beginning of almost every phrase. It more or less meant “and” or “then.” But it was used ten times as often in our translation as it was in natural communication. So, while in the early days I had insisted that the translators make all the logical relations between clauses explicit, after listening to the way people really communicated the translators and I took out all the connectors like ndipo and only added them back in if it caused confusion. Now we were talking. Talking. I realized translations are a necessary component of church life. But the written word just isn’t very popular here in Mozambique. If people have a choice between buying a book or a radio they’re going to buy the radio. There is no culture of books outside of schools. And school books quickly end up torn to strips for cigarette paper or worse toilet paper. Was this the destiny of all our hard work. Would we work for twenty-five years and at the end have nothing more useful than TP substitute. When you’re the last one standing at the gate, and the hordes are piling through, you have to just keep swinging. Bible translation is like that. You work for a quarter century and then people decide that they don’t speak that language anymore. Or the old pastors decide they don’t like this new-fangled translation and so they discourage their flock from using it. Or people would rather sit around watching TV than read your Bible. It is a divine task that always verges on despair. It is faith mixed with heavy doses of futility. But it’s a high calling nonetheless. To be able to look back at a lifetime of toil and see not only a Bible translation, and dictionaries, and bilingual education and young people using the language to write love notes on their cell phones. To be able to take that three weeks of text collection and stick on a shelf in some library somewhere in the world. It might be ignored now. It might be despised. But someday, someone will dust off those pages and discover a treasure. Just a month ago, years after that sissy pink edition of Luke came out, I was visiting the chefe of our village and he brought out a worn out copy from inside his house. “You have to get me a copy of this. This one isn’t mine. I love the stories. And I want my own.”