How Oral Bible Translation May Enrich Other Disciplines
How Oral Bible Translation May Enrich Other Disciplines
Oral Bible translation (OBT) requires a translation both in language, from the biblical texts to living languages, and in medium, from written texts to oral performances. The complexity that arises from the two simultaneous translation processes makes OBT unique within the Bible translation world. The complexity also means that, while oral Bible translators can draw from the rich heritage of resources for written Bible translation, oral Bible translators need specialized tools to remain faithful to the Scriptures in their performances. Traditional translation studies and theories, mostly concerned with translating texts into other texts, have little to say about performance. Other disciplines, though, have plenty to say about performance. Practitioners of oral Bible translation, then, must look to disciplines outside of translation studies to inform their theory and practice.
In so doing, oral Bible translation must become what the scholar McCarty calls an interdiscipline. By drawing from multiple disciplines, interdisciplines create unique mixtures of theory and practice that can in turn enrich the fields from which they first drew. McCarty captures the dynamics and potential blessings of interdisciplines beautifully in the following statement:
A true interdiscipline is… not easily understood, funded or managed in a world already divided along disciplinary lines, despite the standard pieties… Rather it is an entity that exists in the interstices of the existing fields, dealing with some, many or all of them. It is the Phoenician trader among the settled nations. Its existence is enigmatic in such a world; the enigma challenges us to rethink how we organise and institutionalise knowledge. (McCarty 1999, quoted in Munday 2016, 25; emphasis mine)
What disciplines may oral Bible translation (OBT) draw from and later enrich? The following five come to mine as top candidates:
- Biblical Performance Criticism
- Biblical Emotion Studies
- Ethnodoxology
- Translation Studies
- Scripture Engagement
Most scholars today agree that the majority of the Scriptures existed orally before the authors recorded them as written texts. These texts often served as reminders for orally performing the Bible (Steffen et al. 2020, 96-125). The Bible’s cues for the original performances speak deeply to how oral translators should perform the Bible today. The blossoming field of Biblical Performance Criticism (BPC) is concerned with the investigation of the Scripture’s original performance. The related field of Biblical Emotion Studies (BES) can give critical parameters for the emotions in a biblical performance. The insights that BPC and BES may provide remain insufficient for oral translators, however, because they must also know how to apply the insights. The study of genres afforded by ethnoarts and ethnodoxology could provide the keys that oral Bible translators need to apply the insights from BPC to faithful performances within locally recognized conventions. In turn, the use of BPC and ethnodoxology in the OBT process could directly enrich each of these fields.
The research in BPC and BES required to produce literary-quality translations of the Bible would tremendously expand the fields. During the process of producing oral Bible translations, exegetes could produce handbooks or commentaries to guide people in faithfully performing passages of Scripture. These guides could then become full publications, online resources, or parts of class material for translation. The guides in BPC, which would include insights into emotions, could also spill into broader Christian education and spiritual life if professors of preaching in Bible schools and seminaries incorporate them into their curricula. Such use brings us directly into the realm of Scripture Engagement.
Oral Bible translations in local genres may become a top-tier strategy for engaging people with the Scriptures. As already mentioned above, the resources required to make good OBT products could also serve others within Scripture Engagement very well. The same parameters could guide songs, plays, and videos into more faithful and compelling presentations of the Scriptures. OBT products could also provide opportunities to study how people respond to God’s Word differently when it’s presented in oral performance in a church service, rather than read.
Finally, the development of OBT could influence general translation studies because oral translations of the Bible cross the language barrier and the medium barrier (from text to spoken language), which Roman Jakobson called an “intersemiotic” translation (Munday 2016, 9). To remain faithful to the intent of the Scriptures, translators must have justifications for their performance choices from the text. This means that oral translators make more translation decisions than written translators. Oral translations, then, could prove to be a rich source of information for developing translation studies’ understanding of intersemiotic translations.
Sources
- Munday, Jeremy. 2016. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. 4th edition. London; New York: Routledge.
- Steffen, Tom, William Bjoraker, and R. Daniel Shaw. 2020. The Return of Oral Hermeneutics: As Good Today as It Was for the Hebrew Bible and First-Century Christianity. Wipf and Stock.