This is a fascinating topic that I’ve just started looking at so please bear with me as I make a few notes on a complex topic and how it applies to Bible accessibility.
The church I’m currently attending in South Africa is very multicultural and multilingual. This is due in part to its proximity to a Bible college that attracts students from all over Africa as well as a nearby YWAM base that brings students in from all over the world. The language of communication is always English, although it is the norm for several of the songs to be in another language, usually a South African Bantu language but also languages from as far afield as Kenya and Uganda.
What has intrigued me is the choice of Bible translation used and how it is reinforced through displaying it using a video projector. The two translations most often used are NIV and ESV. As a church from the Anglican tradition (CESA), there are numerous readings during the service by various members of the congregation. The sound crew tries to display the text while it is being read, but they don’t know beforehand which version is going to be used. So in some cases the reader will announce which version they are using, or as they are reading the sound crew will discover that the person is using a different version and switch. But it isn’t uncommon to have the oral presentation of the text in one version while another version is being visually displayed.
Now the question in my mind has been how well do all these people from many countries, with widely varying levels of English fluency, understand what is being read?
One might suppose that in a setting like this that it would be advantageous to use a translation that is written in English at a lower grade level rather than one that is written in more complicated or academic language. However, that desire comes into conflict with the issue of acceptability. It appears that the Bible college uses NIV and ESV and so these are the translations deemed acceptable or simply the ones that readers have at hand.
Acceptability is always going to be the key factor in determining whether a Bible gets used. I’m pretty sure you could flood the market with easy to read translations but no one would use them unless their pastor was using it as well. I was talking with a Xhosa speaker about the two major translations in that language and despite the older translation using inappropriate words like “sangoma” (witchdoctor) for doctor, it was still deemed as preferable to the newer translation that “sounds too much like The Message.”
I saw this same thing happen in Malawi, with the older translation, Buku Lopatulika, consistently preferred over the Buku Loyera because it was deemed by pastors to be too interpretive. (Note, it has other acceptability issues such as key terms choice)
Leaving the acceptability issue to one side for a moment, there is reason to believe that an easy to read Bible translation is also easier to understand. According to several studies, reading fluency is an indicator of comprehension. That is, someone who can read a text without faltering or errors and using proper intonation is probably understanding the text better than someone who makes a lot of errors and reads woodenly.
The implication for Scripture readings in a church context is clear: a Bible translation written at a lower grade-level would increase comprehension for hearers (and readers). However, as I’ve mentioned above, acceptability issues would likely prevent an easy to read version being used.
For urban churches in Africa where the incidence of multilingualism is higher it would be in the best interest of the members to use a Bible translation with the lowest possible reading level in the language of wider communication. The dynamics of church hierarchy and tradition will tend to discourage this as older more formal Bibles will be more familiar to those in power and thus used despite their potential incomprehensibility.
For rural churches, where language use tends to be more monolingual, a local language translation is unlikely to face as much opposition. Non-print media such as mp3 players and windup cassette players are also desirable in cases where fluent readers are unavailable.
Two studies that I’m currently looking at on this topic are:
Fluency: Bridge Between Decoding and Reading Comprehension (citation) (pdf)
Oral Reading Fluency Norms: A Valuable Assessment Tool for Reading Teachers (citation) (pdf)
My previous post discussed the idea of copyright as it applies to Bible translations. My information is based on my imperfect knowledge of the Berne Convention which by default grants rights automatically to an author or artist.Peter Kirk rightly questions whether copyright is the appropriate instrument. Dannii also asks if trademark would be a better tool.
Now, the interesting question is who is the intellectual property owner of a translation of the Bible. I know legally that most Bible agencies believe they legally own translations that they have funded, organized and carried out. That is on one level perfectly acceptable. But it could be argued that most of the translations were produced at the behest of local language communities who facilitated the translation process in hopes of coming out of the process with a Bible for them. A slightly different thing happens when I as a linguist go into a language community and pay someone to tell me a folktale which I then turn around and analyze, publish, sell or whatever. Is the teller of the tale the moral owner of his story? If so we must be very careful to respect human rights. In actuality, much linguistic work is recognized as scientific work involving human subjects. As such it is very tightly controlled.
So I guess again the question comes back to who should have the controlling interest in a Bible translation? The agency or the language community?
Now before we write off the Bible agencies, let me just say how difficult it is to archive, edit, revise, print, publish and distribute any kind of print material. Print-on-demand is a fine concept but when you are talking about some of the very large language communities of Southern Africa, it just isn’t effective. No one in the Western world expects that they would be better off if they could just print out their own Bible. We depend on for-profit publishers for many of our favorite translations in the world’s largest languages. But in the diverse communities of Africa we need to have options. That’s why Bible agencies can fulfill their ends by giving certain rights to the public while retaining others. I personally don’t feel that there is a conflict between selling your Bibles on one hand and on the other hand giving away the source files for others to print and possibly give away or sell. If a translation owner is able to supply the demand for Bibles, then it is unlikely that another organization is going to find it possible or desirable to compete with them. But if the same translation organization is not able to supply the demand for print then they almost have a moral imperative to make their texts available to others who might be able to satisfy the demand. See my post, Availability and Accessibility are not the same thing: A case study of the Ndau Bible, for a case where offering the source files to others might help fulfill the Bible agencies mission.
Some people have this idea that it is wrong to copyright a translation of the Bible. The Bible is God’s word for everyone, right? So we shouldn’t do something worldly like create legal barriers to people freely accessing the Scripture. On the surface this argument seems pretty strong. But in reality all Bibles should be, and most are, copyrighted.
Copyright at the most basic level simply states who owns a Bible. This is important for several reasons. First, people have to know where to go to get a copy of that Bible. If a translation is just floating out there with no “owner.” It is highly likely that errors can creep into a translation. Many of the public domain Bibles out there are full of typographical errors, ommissions and sometimes purposeful emendations. By copyrighting a Bible, a Bible agency states their responsibility for the integrity of that text.
At this moment I am writing this article. It’s unpublished and I will do some editing to it before I hit “Publish.” But once I publish it, I as the author am automatically granted copyright of my own work without doing anything else. I don’t need to register my work with the US Copyright Office. I don’t need to put a little c with a circle around it at the bottom of every page. Simply by being the author of this work I hold the copyright whether I want to or not.
Now, I can choose to make my text available in a variety of ways. I can claim “All rights reserved.” That means you can’t do anything with my text without getting my permission first. Or I can grant a “Creative Commons” license for you to reproduce my work as long as you acknowledge that I am the author.The same is true for Bible translations.
Copyrights are not the area that we need to be concerned about in looking at whether or not Bibles are accessible to the people that are meant to use them. Instead it is the area of licenses, or “terms of use” that need to concern us. You’ve probably noticed that in the opening pages of your Bible there is a copyright notice and then some text like, “You may reproduce up to 500 verses as long as you say that this is version ABC of the Bible.” That’s a standard term of use for Bibles. And in the case of large well-established Bible translations for a highly literate and financially secure population, that will usually be all that is necessary.
It gets more complicated when you start looking at smaller language groups that are traditionally marginalized and lack the economic might of a large ethnic group. In these cases, boilerplate licenses for “big” Bibles often don’t work. As I mentioned in my article about the Ndau Bible, you’ve got a combination of factors that are resulting in lack of access to the Scriptures: a poorly resourced Bible society is unable to print sufficient copies, low literacy rates and lack of distribution channels mean that using a single agency to supply the needs of 2.4 million people is not going to work. It’s in cases like this that the copyright owners of a work need to seriously consider using a different form of licensing for their Scripture.
Consider the example of the Catholic translation of the Bible in Makhuwa, one of the largest languages in Mozambique. When our organization spoke with the archbishop of Nampula province about the possibility of distributing their translation as audio, he was thrilled to let us do it. In fact he gave one of our techies the electronic copies of the translation in hopes that we could publish them on the web so that priests and others who use the Scripture in their duties could download Scripture whenever they needed it.
That’s a wonderful example of a copyright owner who sees the value of creating terms of use that are sufficiently flexible to allow others to help them distribute their translation. Now this doesn’t mean that anyone who wants to can just take those Scriptures and change the wording to suit their own theology. And another thing that the Catholics need to consider is whether they will be comfortable with others printing out their Scripture and selling it on the street. On one hand someone else is making money off their hard work. On the other hand, savvy entrepreneurs are getting Makhuwa Scripture into the hands of those who want it.
Another example that bears consideration is the Bibles owned by the Bible Society of South Africa. Their terms of use are pretty restrictive which at first glance would seem to be negative. But the truth is that the Bible Society of South Africa does an excellent job of distributing Scripture in many formats in South Africa. Earlier this week, I sent an SMS to a friend asking where I could get a Xhosa Bible and she wrote right back and said, “Just go to any CNA or Christian bookstore.” And it’s true. The CNA and Checkers in the Blue Route mall which is only a few kilometers from our house both have Bibles in many languages. (I wish they would distribute the English CEV rather than the KJV but that’s a minor quibble.) They are also doing a good job of distributing audio and electronic versions of their Bibles.
So in summary, you can see that copyright is not a sinful thing that shouldn’t be used for Bibles. Rather, as long as the Scripture is available in at least one translation for a people group and accessible in whatever formats are most appropriate then there’s no problem. In those cases where a single Bible agency is not able to resource the needs of a language group, they should consider allowing their Scriptures to be used by others in order that the Bible might have maximum impact.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. –Nelson Mandela
In this post I want to list some of the “truths we hold as self-evident” regarding Bible translation since they are not in fact self-evident.
- Messages are best understood when communicated in a person’s mother-tongue.
- Every effort should be undertaken to translate the Bible into the languages of the world.
- Once translated, the Bible, or portions thereof, should be freely available to the language community.
- The message of Scripture is most effectively communicated using the default communication form of a language group.
Let’s look at each of these assumptions in turn.
1. Messages are best understood when communicated in a person’s mother-tongue
The overwhelming consensus of research about education and literacy is that children learn best when learning in their mother-tongue, or heart language. Even the most fluent polyglot will admit that, as Nelson Mandela said, “if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” This doesn’t mean that humans are not capable of communicating in languages other than their own mother language. But it is to be expected that when someone is forced to communicate in a language that is not the one they learned at their mother’s breast that there will be significant miscommunication.
2. Every effort should be undertaken to translate the Bible into the languages of the world
The Bible as a foundational document espousing human dignity and a knowledge of our Creator is worthy and capable of being translated into every language spoken on this planet. No one should be denied access to the Bible just because their language is spoken by a relatively small population.
3. Once translated, the Bible, or portions thereof, should be freely available to the language community
A language community should be able to freely access any portions of the Bible translated into their language. No rights or licenses should be granted to any individual or organization that inhibit members of a language group from using a Bible translation produced for the benefit of that community.
4. The message of Scripture is most effectively communicated using the default communication form of a language group
While historical assumptions exist that favor the transmission of the Bible through print, there are many, and possibly most, of the world’s language communities that favor oral communication. In such situations, the Bible can not be said to be available to a language group until it is available in non-print forms such as voice recordings, storying, television and radio.
Summary
As I’ve said, these are assumptions about Bible translation and they won’t necessarily be shared by everyone. Also, these assumptions worked out in the real world will raise difficult questions. How do we practically seek to fulfill Assumption 2? Are language communities necessarily entitled to any translation made of their language as Assumption 3 seems to imply?
What assumptions are missing? One assumption that I don’t quite know how to articulate is that a Bible translation will normally not “catch on” where no other language development is being done. And the converse might also be true that where a language is being used in multiple domains (home, work, education, religion) it is more likely to escape endangerment or extinction as a vehicle of communication.
Please feel free to respond to these assumption or offer your own either in the comments or by sending me an email at kanyimbe@gmail.com
UPDATE 12 May: This article has been revised extensively based on input from others. Many thanks!
One of the key metrics that people look at when evaluating the potential for evangelization is the availability of Scripture. However, availability doesn’t mean that anyone necessarily has access to the Scriptures. I’m going to show how this works using the Ndau language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Ndau of Mozambique and Zimbabwe
Demographics: 2.4 million people
The number of first-language speakers of Ndau is listed by various sources as between 2.1 and 2.4 million people. The majority of Ndau speakers live in central Mozambique from the Zimbabwe border to the coast of the Indian Ocean. There are possbily 1.6 million speakers of Ndau in Mozambique according to the 2006 census (quoted in the Ethnologue). In Zimbabwe, the number of Ndau speakers is thought to be around 800,000 people.
Scripture Availability: Full Bible (1957 and 2008), recent New Testament (1999), dramatized New Testament
The situation for Scripture availability in Ndau is quite good. A full Bible has existed since 1957. A recent New Testament was produced in 1999 followed by a full Bible in 2008. And a dramatized version of the New Testament is available for free download on the Internet through Faith Comes By Hearing.
Let’s focus for a minute on the 2008 Ndau Bible. According to representatives of the Zimbabwean Bible Society, 5,000 copies of the New Testament were produced. As a way of visually representing this printing consider the following grid:
This grid is 48×48 squares, each representing 1,000 speakers of the Ndau language in Mozambique and Zimbabwe*. In the bottom right corner you can see just five red squares representing all the known copies of the Ndau Bible.
* This is just an approximation equaling 2,304,000 people.
So as you can see that the actual availability of the Ndau Bible is really low. It’s worse than that actually because according to a report by Beth Wood in February 2011, her mission was able to purchase only a single copy of the 2008 Ndau Bible. UPDATE 12 May/2011: Since then, their mission has succeeded in purchasing 2,000 copies although they haven’t received delivery at the time of writing.
Scripture Accessibility
While the Scriptures are in principle available in the Ndau language, it is almost impossible to get a copy. Consider these factors:
- The most recent printing of Ndau New Testaments was 5,000 copies. Copies are available for purchase at a Christian bookstore in Mutare and the Bible Society in Harare.
- The dramatized version of the New Testament in Ndau is available in only two cities in Mozambique: Beira and Dondo and at the time of writing they don’t have any players to put the recordings on.
Now the reality is actually much worse and much better than the statistics imply. First, the reality is much worse because supposing that every speaker of Ndau magically had a copy of the Bible it is highly unlikely that the majority of them would be able to read it. That’s because the Ndau-speaking people of Mozambique are largely illiterate. For those that are literate they are probably literate in Portuguese or possibly Shona. And to make matters worse, the variant of Ndau used in the 2008 Bible is different from that of the majority of Ndau speakers in Mozambique. Although the various variants of Ndau have more than 80% lexical similarity, that 20% is just the area where most technical and religious vocabulary tends to differ.
Now I said in the last paragraph that the situation is actually better than it appears. What did I mean by that? Well, in many cases, people attending churches in Ndau-speaking regions are likely to have access to some sort of Bible in either a related language like Shona or a language of wider communication like Portuguese.
Finally, a brief note about the dramatized New Testament available from Faith Comes By Hearing. As I mentioned above, the Mozambican Bible Society makes the recording available in only two cities: Beira and Dondo. But these recordings were done with Zimbabwean speakers of Ndau and that is a big problem for the large concentration of speakers of the Mozambican coastal variant of Ndau for the simple reason that Zimbabwean Ndau is tonal but Mozambican coastal Ndau is not. A tonal language conveys all sorts of grammatical and lexical information simply by the pitch of a particular word. The result being that a speaker of coastal Ndau who doesn’t differentiate tone would not have access to all sorts of meaning in a tonal recording.
I’m leaving the preceding paragraph up for reference but it is incorrect on several points. First, the recording was done in Beira with speakers of the coastal (non-tonal) variety of Ndau. Beth Woods states that while this would sound “funny” to speakers of tonal variants of Ndau she doesn’t know of any major grammatical distinctions based on tone.
Summary
In this example we have seen how the Scriptures can be availabie in a language without being accessible. Obstacles to access include:
- Scarcity: A limited print run
- Illiteracy: Print Bibles for illiterate speakers
- Lack of distribution: Only one source of audio Scriptures (and no players currently available)
- Linguistic variation: Key word choice and tonality
So, what should we learn from this? Don’t equate statistics or statements about Bible translations being available in a language with anyone actually being able to have access to those Scriptures. In the case of Ndau, we’ve seen that Availability does not equal Accessibility.
Information sources:
Ethnologue: Ndau: A language of Mozambique.
Presentation by Beth Wood at the Escutai 2011 conference in Beira, Mozambique (February 2011).
Email correspondence with Beth Wood, May 2011. (Many thanks to Beth for patient correction of this article)
Note these numbers are projections based on the International Database data.
The population of the ten Southern African countires is approximately 134 million people.
The following translations are presently available – Afrikaans 1933/53 translation, 1983 translation or Die Bybel vir Almal; English King James Version, Northern Sotho 1951 translation; Southern Sotho 1909 translation in the standard orthography; Tsonga 1929 translation; Tswana 1908 translation or 1970 revised version; Xhosa 1975 or 1996 version and Zulu 1893 translation, 1959 translation or the New Testament 1986 translation.
The excellent Go Bible program works on all but the most basic phones. And I’ve tested it on an Android phone and it works just fine. Bible Society of South Africa is to be commended for sharing their Scriptures via Go Bible.
Electronic versions of the Bible have many advantages. They can be distributed and shared without the costs associated with paper versions. They are searchable in a way that modern people are used to interacting with a text via Google or a CTRL-F Find function. They integrate with the tools that most people already use, either a computer or mobile phone.
However, electronic texts are prone to some weaknesses that print doesn’t necessarily suffer from. First, font rendering, even for texts using a standard Roman script can be a problem. I’ve been currently using the YouVersion and a number of its texts contain ommissions due to quirks in their formating. For example, in the CEV, Joshua 1:9 reads, “Never stop reading he gave you.” It’s supposed to read, “Never stop reading The Book of the Law he gave you.” It seems that the italics are not displaying and are simply omitted. (I’ve confirmed this on Android and online) The other omission I noticed this morning was in the preface to Psalm 7 in NIV which reads “A shiggaion of David, which he sang to the”. Interestingly, here the italics display just fine but the second half of the phrase has disappeared.
For non-Roman characters, the situation is much worse. It’s very common to see the dreaded box in place of characters that can’t be rendered so your Greek or Hebrew will be filled with boxes. This is the case with the Android software, And Bible when displaying the SBL Greek New Testament SWORD module.
Other problems with electronic texts include latency (the lag when switching from one place to another), and general difficulty in jumping to another passage. By the time you poke the screen eight times to get from one passage to the next the preacher might just be heading off to another passage.
There is a sociolinguistic issue with regard to using electronic Bibles. If I’m sitting in church fiddling with my cell phone, what do you think I’m doing? I might be reading an SMS or checking in on Facebook. Nowadays, it’s more common to see people using their phones in church but there’s always a certain feeling of condemnation that you’re fooling around while everyone else is looking at their Bible.
I should mention that the use of overhead projectors is almost a default these days in many churches. On one hand this can be great. Everyone has access to the printed word and from the same version. But a number of things can and do go wrong: the projectionist displays the wrong version, or the wrong passage, or simply can’t get the projector to work at all. In preaching, the overhead can be a huge distraction. Despite what preachers think, having bullet points and waterfalls and all the rest on the screen can seriously hamper the effectiveness of an oral presentation. This is personal gripe of mine I suppose, but PowerPoints are very prone to distracting an audience more than guiding them. The art of verbal persuasion does not need print to prop it up when done properly!
A final problem with electronic Scriptures has been hinted at earlier and that is the distraction of having the Bible in the middle of all your other electronic media. I’m writing this post right now, but I can see emails popping up and Facebook telling me there are two notifications. Our power of concentration is seriously weakened when the Bible is just one voice in a shouting crowd. That’s why it’s nice to turn off all the gadgets and grab that old black book and spend some time reading the Bible.
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World Bible Translation Center: providing free and accessible Scripture in the world’s largest languages
I’ve been an admirer of WBTC for a while now. They are doing so many things right. They translate the Bible in easy-to-read language in the largest languages of the world. They actively seek to distribute their translations for free in PDF format and have very generous terms of use for those wishing to reproduce their texts in other formats (We recently produced an audio version of their Brazilian Portuguese New Testament).
I’ve discovered that they are producing a French for Africa version and a Swahili version. They’ve spoken with me about the possibility of an Old Testament in African Portuguese. The Lord willing that might become a reality one of these days.
WBTC models all that’s best about a Bible agency of the future. They give away everything they can to the most under-resourced populations while also producing versions for purchase in luxury formats like Kindle (click here for the English ERV for Kindle).
The one area where they have been slow to move is in producing versions for electronic Bible software. I keep begging them to produce SWORD modules for their translations.
Visit World Bible Translation Center to support their ministry or download a Bible.
