This mythical place is where the magic happens. Sitting around a big table with Bibles everywhere and dictionaries and laptop computers. It’s fantastic. It’s here that you get to play with all these really interesting languages and try to get them to achieve some sort of consensus. As Luther said, “I thank God that he gave me the opportunity to translate the Bible. Otherwise I would have died under the mistaken assumption that I was a learned man.”

The people that study cross-cultural living talk about a predictable series of phases that the newbie has to pass through. First, there is the honeymoon phase. Everything is new. All the children are cute. The culture is exotic and the natives are friendly. This stage can last from two weeks to an hour, depending on how badly you’re treated at the airport. The next stage is “the morning after.” You start noticing how inconvenient everything is here. And how much you miss the food in your home country. And how exhausting it is to do almost nothing at all. The problem is we place too much importance on language. If we can just learn the language. And memorize the handy expressions. And master the everyday courtesies that we need to get our shopping done. But it’s so much more than that. The language is killer. And we are aware of that. But beyond the surface strangeness of a new country is a vast culture that is always pushing on us like an invisible and over-sized jacket. So by the end of the day, or even halfway through the day you are just exhausted. And starving. And in need of a nap. And usually not thinking very nice thoughts about anyone.

The next stage is acculturation. No one does it perfectly. The poetic amongst us might say that we are changed imperfectly by the culture into a member of a new and awkward race. But if you can just stick it out past that rough first year or so, you might have a chance of making it. When Hilary and I were on our honeymoon, a waiter sagely advised us, “Enjoy the first year. It’s the best.” He was wrong. Many years have outshone that first one (although we did have a lot of fun). And that wisdom is totally wrong when it comes to living in a new country. The first year after the honeymoon euphoria wears off is the worst. It’s the year when our cultural assumptions are ground down to nubs and if we’re lucky we’re able to see even some of the good things about this utterly exasperating country and its people. If you don’t adjust you just quit, head home and maybe wisdom and perspective will soften your bitter memories over time. Despite everything I’ve mentioned about the craziness of our opening years in Tete we really had a terrific time. The Hippo House was a lot of fun. Bible translation was flying and I got to translate the Bible and ask weird questions like, “How would you say, ‘bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance’ in your language?” We visited villages and handed out multiple copies of the book of Jonah in Nyungwe. We had a really popular seminar based on the book of Jonah. The prophet Jonah seems like a strange choice for the early stages of a translation. It was actually drafted in Nyungwe at a workshop in 1995 before I got to Tete. There are several reasons why translators go for Jonah early on. It’s a pretty straight-forward narrative with the exception of the challenging poetry of chapter 2. It is background information to the Gospels where Jesus compares himself to Jonah. It is also a book that shows God’s concern for the gentile nations. It also has the advantage of being a short book. For a new translator the kinds of things that can cause headaches aren’t usually evident on the surface. Punctuation and spelling are tough. Especially in a language that has only recently been standardized for literacy. Another thing is that when you translate the Bible you are dealing with all sorts of crazy culture and geography and concepts for which there aren’t any ready equivalents. The whole point of translating the Bible is to insert into a culture a completely different worldview. If that weren’t the case then evangelism and Bible translation wouldn’t be necessary. So at almost every stage you’re confronted by strange ideas, new vocabulary and the need to sooner or later decide how you’re going to say “baptize” and “angel” and “camel” and all those other words that have no local equivalent so what most translators do is just borrow them (that’s what was done in English). So you end up with kubatizali, and anju and kalamelo. The worst word was Sabbath. In Portuguese it’s Sabado. But that’s also the word for Saturday. Nyungwe has its own word for Saturday, malinkhuma. So we thought we should use a different expression for Sabbath since the whole point of most of the Sabbath stories is that Jesus is working on a day when he’s supposed to be resting. So after a while we started using ntsiku yakupuma, “the day of rest.” This made sense and there wasn’t too much controversy about this choice. But we left behind a number of places where we had said either Sabudu or malinhuma. So now in addition to our good translation choice we had two other translation choices that had been abandoned along the way but we hadn’t noticed. This kind of thing drives translation consultants crazy. But in the early days of a translation project no one else cares. Let me repeat that: no one else cares! I had a special vendetta against the semi-colon. I hate semi-colons. They are the ultimate in punctuation wishy-washiness. The semicolon was created by someone who couldn’t decide whether or not to use a period or a comma so they came up with the bright idea of using both. So semicolons are bad. Evil. Get them out of my translation! But nobody else cared about the semicolon. In fact they liked it. Portuguese is full of semicolons. But not my translation. For a newly literate culture where people are just learning to read and write the average reader has a lot of tolerance for variation. Spelling doesn’t matter to them. Once you say it out loud it all sounds just fine. But for us linguist types, we were crazy about getting the apostrophe in there to differentiate between normal and syllabic nasals. This was a deal breaker for us. What if we left the apostrophe out and someone thought we were saying “plate” instead of “brother?” Think of the confusion that could ensue. Peter, the plate of Andrew! The truth is the context almost always makes such choices obvious. That’s why a language like English can get by without almost any spelling rules at all.

All that to say, a nice little book like Jonah is a good place to start because you don’t get too overwhelmed with inconsistencies before you even start. After a starter book like Jonah, a lot of translation projects do the Gospel of Mark. It is said to be easier than the other Gospels and it gives you a quick payoff and a chance to make some choices about keywords like altar, priest, sacrifice and sin. Of course I would end up in a first-time project where they are translating the challenging Gospel of Luke. It’s not that it’s the hardest Gospel, (believe it or not that honor goes to St. John), it is just a complex Gospel. Luke had a big vocabulary. And he told a lot of stories. And he is really subtle in his language use so you understand what he’s saying but not what he means (John’s vocabulary is easier but nobody is ever quite sure what he’s talking about).

So in those first couple years of translation we acculturated and actually began to thrive in Africa. We loved it here. The translation took off with an initial burst of energy, bogged down in inexperience and personnel conflicts and eventually just fell apart sometime in 2003. That was the moment I had been waiting for. Let the churches get the whole “ownership” thing sorted out and let us go live in a village. We had already found the perfect place to build our folly. It was a mere three hours from Tete on a nice road, up in the mountains. We’d already been living in our hut there for a week or so each month and so we were welcomed and accepted there. So our next step was to start on a major building project. With very little money and no experience we just started contracting local workers, pegging out foundations, and essentially ignoring the piles of building permits that we were supposed to have in hand before we even stuck a shovel in the dirt. But being in the village we got away with a lot of things that you can’t do in the city. By the time we had spent eighteen months working on a house in the village so we could live there and do language and culture study, the Bible translation ignited. It simply burst into flame or activity at least and I was needed to help with a new set of translators. This time a lot of things were in our favor. I was clearly no longer in charge. And that was a good thing. The two head translators had this inner vision that transcended a mere paycheck. And we were all old friends by now who had gone through a lot of stuff together so it started to feel nice and healthy like we were almost getting things started in the right order this time. But of course there was now this problem of the house in the village. We wanted to live in the village. The translators wanted to work in the city. So we very amicably went our separate ways. I would travel to the city for meetings when necessary. And when there was a sizable chunk of translation ready to be checked the translators would come up to the village for a week. It was an idyllic way to translate. In town you have a constant hubbub. There are visitors and errands and the noise and smell of urban Africa. But in the village, everything is peaceful. You can hear the birds. There is no garbage anywhere. You don’t even lock your doors because if anyone stole something from your house the whole village would know about it within hours. And the language! Here in the village they don’t laugh if you speak Nyungwe. They just stare at you embarrassed if you speak Portuguese. The result was that from morning to night we heard Nyungwe spoken all around us (or at least a relatively close dialect of Nyungwe) and more importantly we watched the life of the village. We understood the rhythm of the seasons and the heartbreak of a stillborn baby and the despair of drums that pound through the night in hopes of somehow placating the silent and angry spirits. But more positively we felt in our own alien way connected to the people in Dinthi. They thought we were weird. But they loved us. And we loved them. And when the first water well came to the village we rejoiced. And when Eleanor’s girlfriends started dropping out of school to work at home or marry to young we got mad. Living in the city is necessary and convenient sometimes but it isn’t Mozambique. Ninety percent of Mozambicans live in a village just like the one we lived in for those few years. Where time is marked by the passing of the sun. Where conversation is the fabric that knits together a community. Where chronic drunkenness saps the life out of some families while other families thrive through hard work and thrift.

Having the translators come up and spend the week in the village was a dream come true. Our productivity soared. The quality of our translation kept improving. When the translators didn’t know how to express something idiomatically in Nyungwe most times they could just turn to some friendly face that was watching them work and ask, “How would you say that?” So we discovered that living in the village was not a preliminary activity to engage in before returning to full time translation. Instead it became the reality check for the translators, and my opportunity to discover the true nature of Bible translation.