Learning as a Geographical Process

Halvor Ronning These articles, and the introduction to them, catapult us readers into a highly sophisticated terminological world of theoretical considerations of the importance of geography. Our program of training mother tongue translators "the language of the Bible in the land of the Bible" is where the rubber hits the road. TEXT in its geographical CONTEXT is the raison d'etre of our special program at the Hebrew University these past 22 years. The geographical "displacement" of all Bible translators who have NOT lived in the land of the Bible has led to multitudes of humorous and tragic mistakes in Bible translation. Our purpose is to deliberately "dislocate" mother tongue Bible translators back into the original geographical environment so as to recover the nuances of the multiple metaphors and the similes used to communicate the biblical message. To use the academic jargon of Ernst Gutt (a noted translation philosopher), we aim "to reduce the artificiality of the cognitive environments" of the translators by exposing them to the geography of the Hebrew writers. It is our experience, after just now helping to host the annual conference of the Forum of Bible Agencies International in Jerusalem for the first time ever this April of 2017, that the popularity of our program is being catapulted to a level that help is needed to meet the demand. The growing realization of the intellectual and experiential resources available in the Land of the Bible together with the practicality of modern air travel are raising our consciousness of the relevance of our respective geographical environments on how we learn and what we think we know. Consider this quote from Esteban Voth, a high level executive in the United Bible societies: “The backgrounds of the translators are so immensely different …that my greatest joy is to provide the opportunity for them to experience the land of the Bible, the land of the Patriarchs, the land of Jesus for themselves”. In the case of Bible translators this is not primarily the important matter of personal pilgrimage, but of sensing how Bible geography as a visual experiential dictionary of the Bible is actually an essential tool of the translator. www.bibletranslators.org