Audio Bibles - the challenges and what we're doing about it
This is part two of a three-part series summarizing my paper on the way that capturing the artistry of the biblical text in its original language results in more accurate, clearer, and more powerful translations.
If you missed last week, you can read it here: Uncovering gems in Luke 15.
Audio Bibles - the challenges and what we’re doing about it
I woke up minutes before I had to leave, prompting me to pursue time with Scripture in ways that wouldn’t require sitting or reading. Thankfully, BibleGateway had an audio version of my choice translation that I could listen to throughout the day. I pressed a button while walking to class and heard a voice speaking in my ear: “The Gospel of Matthew, chapter nine. And, getting into a boat, he crossed over and came to his own city…” That was about all I heard before my mind wandered and I needed to restart the chapter.
This process repeated over and over until, finally, I gave up trying to absorb God’s word through an audio Bible that day.
My story is not unique.
Why?
After studying linguistics and translation principles for eight years, I now know why audio Bibles are challenging to focus on. In short, how they are read makes a huge difference. We are taking steps to improve audio translations within the Oral Bible Translation movement, as illustrated by my team’s translation of Luke 15.
What’s challenging with most audio Bibles
What’s challenging with most audio Bibles (and many audio books) is that the people reading them do not communicate naturally with their voice. Our brains, calibrated to understand spoken language as it naturally occurs, cannot completely grasp the meaning of the text because the reading style sends mixed signals. Unpacking this problem requires a brief foray into linguistics and cognitive science.
To understand what someone is saying, people need to understand (c.f. Frost 2022):
- How to divide the incoming speech into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and groups of paragraphs.
- The function of each word, phrase, sentence, etc., in its context.
As an illustration, in written language, where we add a .period really makes a difference. As does where we break a paragraph. Strange uses of p.e.r.iods or paragraph
breaks
make it
harder to understand an author’s intent.
The same applies to when people communicate with their voice. The major difference is that, in vocal language, people rely upon prosody instead of punctuation (cf. Bruti 2019, 21-22). Instead of using a comma, we pause slightly. Instead of using an exclamation mark, we raise our pitch, speed, and/or volume. Instead of a question mark, we raise the pitch of our voice at the end of the sentence. Our prosody often carries the weight of communicating our emotions and illocutionary force (i.e., whether we are asking a question or giving a command).
The brain identifies the prosody of someone’s voice before that person ever finishes a syllable. Prosody actually plays a larger role in decoding communication in an oral setting than the wording of a sentence. When the intonation signals a different meaning from the words, the human brain becomes unconsciously biased toward the meaning signaled through the intonation (Filippi et al. 2017; Lin et al. 2020). We have all heard someone say “everything is fine, it’s really fine” through a clenched jaw, knowing from their voice that things were not fine. Researchers call this “prosaic dominance” in processing speech (Ben-David et al. 2016).
Sadly, most audio Bibles do not feature a convincing prosodic delivery. Most audio-Bible readers enunciate each word perfectly but do not express the emotions of the text through intonation, appropriate pauses between paragraphs, or changes in tempo (or other features) at a text’s peak sections. By giving equal weight to each line, the readers inadvertently make the main points of the passage more difficult to understand. These mixed messages, then, take longer for the brain to decode. Because the brain relies so heavily upon prosody, it has to work much harder when the meaning of the words does not align with the prosody. Many times, the brain simply “checks out” because the speech is too foreign to decode for long stretches of time.
I do not blame the translators, audio-Bible readers, or publishing companies for these challenges of listening to audio Bibles. Until the last decade or two, the science of linguistics had not progressed far enough for us to know how to make them better. Now that it has, audio translations can be better—a lot better.
How the Oral Bible Translation team I help avoids audio Bible pitfalls
One of my roles with Wycliffe is to serve on a team producing an Oral Bible Translation into standard American English.
Why another Bible in English when we already have over 100?
Our initial field testing shows that not only do translation teams like our translation more than audio Bibles (NLT, NIV, etc.) but they also understand our Oral Translation better. Serving as a model, this translation could directly increase the quality and production rate of hundreds of Bible translations in the coming decades.
I hope that our Oral Bible Translation methods will help shift the global audio-Bible culture.
I helped my team avoid the pitfall of most audio Bibles by giving them the information they needed to make the passage sound natural in spoken English. They learned the function of each sentence and paragraph in Luke 15 (for this analysis, see my paper), and practiced voicing them in natural ways. Understanding these aspects of the artistry within the text helped them connect with the passage more deeply, which resulted in a more accurate draft in less time (see the graphic beneath).
After just 90 minutes of processing the chapter, one of the translators could accurately and persuasively retell all 32 verses of Luke 15. Deeply understanding the artistry of the passage meant she could easily translate it into English. She wonderfully used her voice to capture how each story in Luke 15 unfolds, how the Pharisees and older son sound similar, and how Jesus ends Luke 15 with a cliff hanger.
Now, it’s one thing to attempt communicating something this nuanced in a translation and it’s another when it actually works. So, we tested our translation with around 50 people against the best audio Bible I could find.
The results blew us away.
Next week, you’ll get to hear about them!
TL;DR
If the email was too long to read, here are the main points:
- In order to understand a message, people need know (1) how to parse sounds into words and combine words into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, etc., and (2) the function each word, phrase, etc., has.
- People use their voices to communicate how their audience should handle points (1) and (2) above.
- Most audio-Bible readers do not use their voices to communicate paragraph breaks or emotions, which makes the content very difficult to understand.
- I help my Oral Bible Translation team avoid the pitfall of most audio Bibles by helping them understand the original meaning of the Bible well enough to capture it with their voice in Standard American English.
- We compared how well ~50 people understood our draft of Luke 15 versus the best audio Bible I could find; the results blew me away.
Challenge for You
Pay attention to how much you rely upon your voice to communicate your feelings. When do you raise it? When do you lower it? When do you get louder? When do you get faster? When do you pause?
References
- Ben-David, B. M., Multani, N., Shakuf, V., Rudzicz, F., & van Lieshout, P. H. H. M. (2016). Prosody and Semantics Are Separate but Not Separable Channels in the Perception of Emotional Speech: Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59(1), 72–89. https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_JSLHR-H-14-0323
- Bruti, S. (2019). Speech Acts and Translation. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics (1st edition, pp. 13–26). Routledge.
- Filippi, P., Ocklenburg, S., Bowling, D. L., Heege, L., Güntürkün, O., Newen, A., & de Boer, B. (2017). More than words (and faces): Evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing. Cognition & Emotion, 31(5), 879–891. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2016.1177489
- Frost, Katie. 2022. “The Psalms Alive through Your Arts.” GCAM Conference.
- Lin, Y., Ding, H., & Zhang, Y. (2020). Prosody Dominates Over Semantics in Emotion Word Processing: Evidence From Cross-Channel and Cross-Modal Stroop Effects. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 63(3), 896–912. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00258