MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tbtd/74/3

Muslim-Idiom Translation

Muslim-Idiom Bible Translation (MIT) has been a hugely prominent and influential issue in Bible translation practice in the last fifteen years, whilst in research terms it has become one of the least published specialisms in the profession. Controversies around this relatively small and technical part of the work of the major Bible translation organisations, magnified by US evangelical Christian media, have impacted the powerful US donor public and thus deeply shaped the very identity of organisations on different sides of the debate and left fault-lines. The United Bible Societies, committed to the highest levels of biblical scholarship, collaboration with a wide range of partners, and local ownership of translation processes, decisions, and products, have not taken sides in the controversies. Nevertheless, traces of the controversies can now be seen throughout the Muslim-majority Bible translation world. And most practitioners have considered it best to avoid publicity and to focus on serving their local audience, together with local and national partner organisations and churches.

What may be described as MITs exist in Arabic, Chadian Arabic, Russian, Balochi, Urdu, Turkish, Bengali, Thai, Chinese, English, and many lesser-known languages. They use linguistic, sociolinguistic, literary, and publishing contextualisation strategies like all Bible products. In fact, what may be referred to by translation scholars, social anthropologists, and missiologists as contextualisation, localisation, inculturation, entextualisation, domestication, and so on is arguably inherent in all of Bible translation practitioners’ standard parameters of dynamic/functional equivalence, and being “meaning-based” and “accurate, clear, natural, and acceptable.” One root cause of controversies has been a failure by western anglophone evangelical critics to recognise quite how contextualised are their own Christian-idiom Bibles.

The most distinctive features of contextualisation in MITs are perhaps the avoidance of anthropotheism and the use of euphemisms, honorific titles, and formulaic key expressions. The term Allah, standard in the Arabic Bible, may seem unusual in languages which have another term for “God,” especially if it is used, as in some MITs, to render the Name of God, יהוה‎ YHWH. Most MITs also have distinctive graphic design, a set of paratextual features which contribute significantly to the hermeneutic context of the text itself (and which are for that reason addressed in two of the papers in this volume).

The rendering of one particular New Testament term, υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ huios tou theou “Son of God,” and its corollary, θεός πατήρ theos patēr “God the Father” (that is, “Divine familial terms” [DFT]) has attracted the most popular attention in recent years. Translators in various languages, reading these as anthropotheistic metaphors, have maintained that it was possible to render their meaning adequately without using a biological-familial term which would cause offence to Muslims (since using such language of God is proscribed in the Qur’ān). Collin Hansen’s popular article “The Son and the Crescent” (Christianity Today 2011), and Biblical Missiology’s online petition against MIT practitioners, “Lost In Translation: Keep ‘Father’ & ‘Son’ in the Bible” (change.org 2012), resulted in a vocal US evangelical lobby insisting that a biological-familial term be used; mediation was then provided by the World Evangelical Alliance in 2013.

Subsequent criticisms of MIT have appeared in the books Muslim Conversions to Christ: A Critique of Insider Movements in Islamic Contexts (2018) and Islam and the Bible: Questioning Muslim Idiom Translations (2023), the online Arlington Statement on Bible Translation (2020) and many articles in the Journal of Biblical Missiology. Such initiatives have typically been led by the same small group of US-based evangelical missiologists, not biblical scholars or Bible translation consultants, and have sometimes discredited themselves by their choice of words.

The present special issue of The Bible Translator stands in a very different tradition. Muslim-audience and Muslim-context Bible translation and implications for Bible engagement have received attention within the United Bible Societies in Sweetman’s The Bible in Islam (1953), the UBS Bulletin Bible Work in the Nucleus of Islam (1979), many papers in The Bible Translator, subsequently collected in two virtual issues entitled On Translating the Bible in Islamic Contexts (2016): Volume 1: Divine Names and Publications for Muslim Audiences (including papers from a UBS conference in Jakarta in 1952) and Volume 2: Case Studies from around the World, and more recently in collaborations with the Oxford and Houston Centres for Muslim-Christian Studies, published as Reading the Bible in Islamic Context: Qur’anic Conversations (2018) and Reading the Gospels in Islamic Context (forthcoming), with the Centre for Translation Studies at KU Leuven, published as Retranslating the Bible and the Qur’an (forthcoming), and at the biennial conferences of the Abraham Center at Dallas International University and of UBS’s TAZI initiative. In such publications and conference papers, MIT issues are addressed specifically within their distinctive historical and local contexts, and that is the case here too. The contributors to this special issue were all born in different countries, represent a wide range of Christian confessions, and their papers address Arabic, Pasaale (Ghana), Turkish, Urdu, Thai, and Chinese. Most are Bible translation consultants.

As usual, all authors, including the four of us who work for UBS, express here our own views, not in any way policies of The Bible Translator journal or of UBS.

Two historical perspectives show how MIT strategies were employed almost as soon as a recognisable Muslim idiom existed. Miriam L. Hjälm describes the use of qur’ānic vocabulary in ninth- and tenth-century Christian translations from Syriac into Arabic, and then of qur’ānic graphic design by the fourteenth-century Coptic scribe Girgis, showing how both of them represent consciously “entering the space of ‘the other.’” Sameh Hanna then presents the work of the early tenth-century Jewish scholar Sa‘adia Gaon as a paradigm shift in Judaeo-Arabic Bible translation, some of his solutions going far beyond those typically employed in MITs today.

Two technical papers describe specific aspects of Muslim-audience products. Andy Warren-Rothlin surveys the key linguistic strategies used in MITs today, then focuses on divine titles, euphemisms, and key expressions, showing how MIT strategies sit firmly within centuries-old traditions of biblical transmission and translation. David A. Ross compares features of Christian and Islamic art traditions, focusing on colours and symbols, also in architecture; all of these carry meaning and so need to be considered carefully in the graphic design of Bible products intended for Muslim readers.

Five regional practical papers come from Ghana, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, and China. Fabian N. Dapila compares two Pasaale translation products done by a Muslim and a Christian team respectively, demonstrating that there is next to no evidence of Islamic influence, and that the Muslim’s translation is in fact at points better. Hasan H. Akkuş and Bill T. Richardson describe the sociolinguistic situation in modern Turkey and the history of Turkish Bible translation as the background to a survey conducted among Turkish-speaking Muslims as to their linguistic and paratextual preferences in Bible translations; the results may helpfully inform new translation projects. Teyyeb Saleem looks at how Urdu interlinear glosses may be chosen, demonstrating that theologically neutral terms simply do not exist—every term is loaded with Muslim or Christian associations, and translators are in a constant search for the best way to enable their readers and hearers to understand and engage with the meaning of the source text. Stephen Pattemore compares Christian and Muslim responses to the special register of Thai royal language and shows how these have influenced the Thai MIT. Simon Wong describes the context and character of the recent first Chinese MIT, identifying lexical variations from the Chinese New Version base text as well as the use of an Islamic colloquial idiom at points.

A book review is offered by Sameh Hanna of Vevian Zaki’s The Pauline Epistles in Arabic: Manuscripts, Versions, and Transmission (2022), which makes an important addition to the history of linguistic engagement between Muslims and Christians through Bible translation.

Technical though some of these discussions may be, they are much more than academic. Our sincere hope is that this is a constructive and encouraging scholarly contribution, but more importantly, may it equip us all to better serve those who have yet to know al-Masīḥ himself.

Andy Warren-Rothlin

Articles

4 comments

DLDonald LoweFeb 20, 2024, 2:50 AM

This paragraph caught my attention: "Subsequent criticisms of MIT have appeared in the books Mu

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TMTroy ManningApr 18, 2024, 4:58 PM

I would encourage Andy to notice the list of signers of the Arlington Statement, since he presents opposition to MIT's as if it's mostly coming just from the West and from non-scholars. I wonder if he's read Islam and the Bible. He should read it, including Thomas Schreiner's article. Note carefully the non-western scholars who wrote articles. He should read Vitrano-Wilson's article that presents the Arab Christian denouncements of MIT's. In 2017 over two dozen Arab pastors signed an open letter rejecting three MIT's. And in the summer of 2020, there was quite an uproar about the MIT publisher Al-Kalima. Coptic, Protestant, and Catholic churches in Egypt were quite furious about it. Even the Bible Society of Egypt distanced themselves from it. This certainly doesn't sound like a US-based-only opposition to me!

EJEdward J KotynskiApr 19, 2024, 11:59 AM

This is a very interesting question, Seth. I am of not sure. I think the way it is done in all-caps is the minimum we should do. The reason I think it is complicated is that the Septuagint tradition perhaps reflects the sentiment of Jews at the time of Jesus. Would Jesus have been happy with κύριος? He allowed the NT to be written in Greek where the tetragrammaton (יהוה) is not be distinguishable from אדוני. But then there are those passages where translations continually irritate me, such as when Acts refers to Tabitha which "translated means Dorcas". That is not a translation at all. Why not just translate the Greek: which "translated means Gazelle". But I must be humble, since then I would have to be consistent and insist that Χριστός be translated "anointed" rather than "Christ" or "Messiah". Sorry my answer is not very black-and-white.

SVSeth Vitrano-WilsonApr 19, 2024, 2:27 PM

That's funny; I was just thinking about the translation of the "Tabitha which means Dorcas" line yesterday. I agree that there's a mismatch; same mismatch as with "Thomas which means Didymus" and similar to "Simon whom he called

The Bible Translator 74.3 (Dec 2023)

Muslim-Idiom Translation

Articles

Technical Papers

Practical Papers

Book Review

4 comments