The Bible Translator's Creed
The Bible Translator's Creed
I believe that the Triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the ultimate inspirer and preserver of the Scriptures--continually motivates and superintends their translation and transmission into the diverse languages and dialects on earth.
I believe every Christian community, regardless of confession, deserves to have access to a Bible its members can understand, and that this implies translation.
I believe that this Bible translation should be of the very highest quality.
I believe that this Bible should be translated by translators who are native speakers of their own languages unless circumstances prevent this.
I believe this Bible should be fully translated into the translating languages and cultures without losing the force and meaning of the original texts as best we understand them.
I believe this Bible should be translated using the original texts directly or indirectly, with the best of current biblical scholarship being made available to the native speaker translators in the process.
I believe this Bible should be as full a Bible as possible, recognizing that the NT lacks its natural context without the OT and that attempts to shorten the OT will inevitably result in creating a canon within the Canon.
I believe this Bible should take the form most suited to and chosen by the community it will serve, whether print, audio, video, or something else.
I believe that this Bible should be produced in the most efficient way possible without sacrificing quality, using all the means of modern technology available.
I believe that Bible translation is an ongoing and never-ending process, demonstrated by the history of Bible translation in majority languages throughout the world.
I believe that those communities without access (or with poor access) to scriptures should have priority in this process of Bible translation worldwide.
I believe those Christian communities with access to many and varied translations have a special obligation to aid those who do not have any (or very little) as yet.
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I spent all of yesterday (well, to be honest, intermittently) trying to get into this site after a long absence. Now I've finally got the combination of email address and p/word right I find I have missed a fascinating discussion. Inspiration and translation, faith and logic, truth and politics - thank you for all your contributions! Last year at the SBL session on Ecological Hermeneutics there was debate over the relative merits of and lack of compatibility between Gen 1 and Gen 2 inregard to the human mandate for the rest of creation. Afterwards I asked Norm Habel (the Grand Guru of E.H.) how he relates them. He said, in my words, "I choose to follow the one that accords with the values of Christ and ignore the other." I thought at the time that I can personally live with such a position - in fact it is often my position of a number of OT issues - but as a translator I am bound to translate, as Lynell said, "warts and all." I think that is an act of acknowledgment of the inspiration of earlier communities of faith, albeit one which defies my own standards of logic.
Nice. What makes this even better is that Ben Elson (the author of the other translators' "creed") was a childhood (and later life-long) friend of my father's. They decided to join Wycliffe together in 1940, after attending the third year of "Camp Wycliffe," where their teachers were William Cameron Townsend, Kenneth Pike, and Eugene Nida! And for a little more inter-connectedness, a year or two earlier Edward Sywulka had studied at the second year of Camp Wycliffe and went back to work on Bible translation with the Mam of Ostuncalco. Ostuncalco is reputedly the very village where Townsend had his epiphany about Bible translation into native languages while trying to sell Bibles in Spanish to indigenous speakers of Mam. And many years later, I was the UBS consultant who helped finish the Mam Ostuncalco Bible. It all comes around.