Martha Wade first went as a Pioneer Bible Translators’ missionary to Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1980. In addition to her serving as a Bible translator for the Apal people, she also serves as a translation consultant for many of our translators and national co-translators who work in other minority language groups. Recently she traveled to South Asia to do some consultant training for one of our missionaries and his national co-translators. One of the resources they were using was the Bible translation in the majority language of that country, which is not always a reliable translation of the original Greek.
She shares the following story about translating Matthew 8:32, which in English reads “the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water.”
“The herd of pigs ran up a steep mountain and perished in the lake.” The Bible in the majority language of the area has the pigs running up a steep mountain and so the translation we were checking had the pigs running up a steep mountain and then somehow making a big leap into the lake and dying there.
The consultant trainee was asking good questions such as, “How did they die? Did they die because they were jumping off from such a high mountain or were they drowning? To one of the listeners it sounded more like the pigs were dying in mid-air from the shock of taking a big dive off the mountain.
After searching on computers and the Internet, we found various pictures that showed a cliff next to a lake and some line drawings showed the pigs going off the cliff and drowning…. After a few attempts at revising the passage, they finally got it right and the pigs were properly dying by drowning.
Another story Martha shared was about a totally new experience:
I have never had a consulting session affected by elephant migration. When I first heard that we would only be able to work from about 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with the language helpers because of elephant migration, I thought they were joking. However, later that week I read two articles in the local newspaper about the elephant migration. One article talked about the migration being especially heavy and that they were using firecrackers to scare wild elephants away from the ripening fields of farmers and their villages. The other article talked about putting special cameras at key locations along the railroad line to prevent the wrong kind of interactions between trains and wild elephants. Later we read about one death due to wild elephants. We are working in a suburb of a city so I have not personally seen the elephants (though the homeowner I am renting an apartment from said that ten years ago the elephants also came through the streets in front of this house).
Martha told one final story:
“Did Jesus sing?” asked the advisor as he looked over the changes that had been made in the Matthew checking session while he had been working with another consultant checking Ephesians. As it turns out, there was a spelling error combined with a poor word choice for teaching that resulted in Jesus singing and preaching. I am sure Jesus would have had a magnificent voice if/when he sang, but since we have no record of him singing it is definitely not good to add a singing Jesus into this translation of Matthew.
Thank God that this checking session happened. It is the result of numerous answered prayers.
Thank God for enabling Martha to use her consultant expertise to help create quality translations.
Pray that God will raise up additional well-trained translation consultants for Pioneer Bible Translators so that the time lapse between completed rough drafts of Scripture and printed translations is shortened.
Thank you for your prayers, Gerald & Ruth Denny Coordinators of Prayer Ministries Pioneer Bible Translators
