Featured Oral Bible Translations

A comparatively recent development in Bible translation is the oral translation. The idea is that when a people group does not have a written language, a translation is produced which sidesteps that problem by making the translation oral only. The Christians of the people group then do not need a written Bible to know God's Word, but can learn of the Lord by simply hearing the Word.

The traditional way is: learn the language from the people group members, analyzing the phonemes (smallest units of sound) and morphemes (smallest units of meaning), learning the syntax (sentence structure), writing a grammar, writing a dictionary, eventually producing a written script. Along the way, you translate Mark or John with native speaker help. This all may actually take decades. These people, to me, are the elite of missionary Bible translation, the special forces of missions. But it is a long process.

What are your thoughts about oral translations? Good idea, bad idea? Temporary or permanent solution?

I'm still thinking this through myself, so I'd like input. I'll post later on what I've heard or read in this area.

 

The thing is, the process for translating would be very similar for either a written or an oral translation. The only thing missing for an oral translation would be developing a written script. Or would it? The fact is, to get a good translation it takes several drafts, and how would the translator know what the previous draft was unless it was somehow written down, if only in the Roman alphabet. The only alternatives are: just do one draft (poor), have someone who is very talented at memorizing, and (the most likely), keeping many audio files until the final draft was done. And if you opt for one of these, why not write it down in one form or another?

I know of an older oral translation of the NT into the Rohingya language. What is problematic is that the translation was done in analog form, and everything is digital nowadays. But the digital technology has certainly developed in the 21st century: cell phones and computers with audio files, dedicated audio recorders, etc.

More about this language later.

 

Yes, there are similarities, except that (1) there were written alphabets everywhere the early missionaries went for the first two centuries or so, Latin and Greek.

Hadn't heard that, but it's certainly possible.

Hadn't heard about this, but it does seem possible if unlikely, since there were no recording devices back then. The missionaries would naturally want to write it down and print it up, since that was the way things were done.

If the only translation in a given language is oral, that's certainly much better than no translation at all.

 

All of this is well and good. Many so-called "primitive" people groups have an oral culture that hands down stories and traditions. The problem is that such methods are inaccurate. The message ends up getting garbled.

An example of this is the "Hidden Christians" of Japan, who went underground during the severe persecutions of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th century. Francis Xavier had not seen fit to produce a Bible translation, so the people had nothing to judge their doctrine by except the traditions and a few copied, non-Scriptural documents. By the time Catholic missionaries were allowed in again in the mid-19th century, the beliefs of the Hidden Christians were unrecognizable.

 

Consider the difficulties of getting an oral translation to every member of a people group, especially one in the jungle with little contact with the outside world. Printing up a Bible is much cheaper than providing a digital device to every believing member of a people group.

On the other hand, I read this statistic recently: 85% of the people in the world now have a cell phone, and those are usually going to have a recording app. Everywhere I've been in Asia and Africa, almost everyone was carrying a cell phone--at least a flip phone!

 

This is not really provable, since they did not have any way to record such things other than writing them down.

Having said that, oral tradition and oral translation are not the same animal.

 

The end goal of a modern oral translation would not be simply an oral presentation (if I understand what you mean by that) such as at a theological society meeting, but oral dissemination, whether through memorization or electronic reproduction.

 

Thank you for the very interesting link. However, this is not exactly what a modern oral Bible translation is about. It is one thing for a genius like Sequoyah to invent an alphabet for his own people, but it is another thing to produce a translation of the Bible that does not exist in written form.

 

Thanks for the link. Maybe I'm missing something, but I did not find anything in the article about a strictly oral translation.

 

This is relevant, but not exactly parallel to the modern concept of an oral translation.

A couple of years ago I was sent to an African country to see if we could get an oral translation started for a people group with an unwritten language in that country. I spent time training the prospective African translators, then we spent time working on 1 John, getting partway. (One of the men went ahead and finished that book on his own.) We took digital recorders with us with the idea of putting our work onto those. Unfortunately, the nationals did not take up the complete burden, and the work stalled. However, the idea was that the final product would exist only digitally, not on paper, so that it could be shared on digital machines of various kinds.

Thanks for the link. The article is typical Wikipedia, with the general facts right, but some errors, at least in the discussion of Japanese. For example, there are five syllables in the Japanese alphabet which are strictly vowels, so the syllabary is not just "mainly CV," as the article says. Looks like someone knew what they were doing, then someone corrected it who didn't.