One Little Vowel

This week we've been specifically looking at translation stories from the field, and today I wanted to share my favorite so far! This story was first told in 2012 by a missionary couple who worked in Cameroon, and there is an exciting update about this language below, so be sure to read all the way to the bottom!

Friends, this story encapsulates why I am on this journey in the first place, and why I long to take you with me! I love the concept that God has placed his footprint/fingerprint/blueprint into the history of all of His people, and that sometimes we can find the clues He left us that lead to Him right inside of language. 

We've spoken before about how closely tied to our identity language is, and I am astounded by the way that the process of translation makes us ask questions that lead to deep and lasting transformation.  

Dangwa Pierre, President of the Hdi Translation Committee,
with Lee Bramlett, translation advisor to the committee.

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people?  What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know who He is and how He wants to relate to them?

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.

“Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” Lee asked.

“Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?”  Lee asked. Everyone laughed.

 “Of course not!” they said. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded.

“Do you know what this would mean?” they asked. “This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

One simple vowel, and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you based on who I am. I love you because of Me and not because of you.”

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, and not a mean and scary spirit, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.

The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and twenty-nine thousand speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25,  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church.…”  I invite you to pray for them as they absorb and seek to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

As God’s Word is translated around the world, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God ‘dvu’-d us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God’s unconditional love.

Bible Translation Acceleration Update! : 

The YouVersion community has now reached a truly global milestone: The Bible App just added its 1,000th Bible version! With Bibles available in more than 700 languages, that means that millions of people are now reading God’s Word in the language of their hearts, together.

Version number 1,000 is Deftera Lfida Dzratawi (XEDNT), the first digital translation of the New Testament into Hdi (pronounced huh-DEE), a language spoken mostly in Cameroon and neighboring Nigeria. Generously provided to the YouVersion community by Wycliffe, this Bible’s translation is an incredible story of perseverance and love decades in the making!

Translation needs in the Pacific

Through the rest of this week, I want to showcase some beautiful graphic-representations of the needs left in five major world-regions. Today we look at the Pacific, an area dear to my heart because of Papua New Guinea! Many of the Bibleless people groups are in this area of the world, with 1,311 living languages still spoken within this region! Language varieties were often kept separate and distinct in these areas (as opposed to the expansion and overlapping of many other languages, like how English spread) due to sharp geographical features, like mountains that historically made communication between people groups much more unlikely. Take a look at these language and world facts, focusing on the work that is left to be done. 

View a clickable, larger version at http://blog.wycliffe.org/2014/06/16/wycliffe-world-highlights-pacific/

Portrait of translation

This tapestry, it fills my heart now in a way more than ever before. I mentioned last week that many years ago, I didn't understand all the roles that were required for this task.. I didn't understand its vastness, I had no concept of two thousand languages spoken by 180 million people without the Bible in their language, so at that time, my mind had only two categories for this work: Bible translator, and sender.

With my interest came research though, and then the hunger for more research brought me on a trip to Ghana with Wycliffe Discovery in 2004! And adventure and knowledge were added to research, and with knowledge came fire. Through that experience and through getting to begin linguistic training, I learned of Language Survey, alphabet-writing, night literacy courses being taught in the jungle by the light of thunder-lamps. I learned about data programs being written by the tech-minded missionary that can accelerate the "code cracking" of language development and translation. And there are teachers that are needed for the families called to this life-long work. And none of it works without the rest of it.

And now, on the other side of some life-changing events for me, through health issues that, at least for now, change my ability to be a Language Surveyor in uncharted territory, I look through the prism at God's call on my life to be a part of Bible translation, and I understand this call now more than I did before. Just as He expanded my two categories of Bible translation into the more real tapestry-paradigm, replete with the many categories of roles that are needed, I now know with more certainty and trust that this is what I'm made for, and that this call will continue to surprise me, in all the many forms and roles that Abba places before me. I see a fuller picture now, and that each role is one of the exquisite colors needed to complete what He is creating, and that there is a call and a role for every believer in this commission to make disciples and bring the gospel.

CanIL's First Scripture Celebration Day and some Mon-thoughts...

To say a class is changing my life might be an overstatement; but to say that I have experienced quite an incredible shift of understanding is not nearly saying enough. Goodness, Scripture Use has taken everything I know about the concepts surrounding Bible Translation, and carved open the chest on it, exposing a wild heart, and some complicated, throbbing veins.

Where other Linguistics courses I've taken so far teach the technical ins-and-outs about what we need to know about language in order to get any of this right, this class throws an anchor back into the discussion and reminds me about all of the living layers of things we must learn about people and cultures in order to not mess the language and translation stuff up!

Week after week in this class, we receive an arsenal of stories of how the "smallest" of details can deeply matter in how a different culture receives the Word of God, and daily I find my heart thrumming with the grace-filled, glorious fact that He has placed bits of HIS image in each of these people groups, and we must find the pieces of that, and point to them; indicate HIM in the places that they will recognize Him, and then show all the other facets of who He is that are maybe completely counter-cultural.

One of the things that Scripture Use focuses on, then, is local arts within a culture, so that when the Bible begins to be translated,...when there's even just ONE VERSE, believers within the culture can begin working with the translation team to spread the message through indigenous songs, print-media, dramas, works of art, traditional paintings, ANYTHING that speaks of God to the culture from the culture. 

This need was brought home to me most in the tiny quote of a Tanzanian pastor that my friend told me about the other day... Her parents are missionaries, and a few years ago this pastor-friend relayed a message of years of pain and wounding that came from initial missionary-efforts, many years ago. He said: "When you brought us the Word, it was like a loaf of bread, SO nourishing, but wrapped in the Westerners' baggie. We were so hungry for it that we ate the whole thing, and now we are choking on the plastic."

This breaks my heart, and it isn't Christ's intention in the least. Although Western hymns and ancient traditions can bring life and meaningful teaching, if they are the only way that we deliver the Word or "establish church," we lose so much, we dwarf the hearts and the image in those hearts of the One who saves, whose Personality is vivacious, vivid, color-on-fire, holy and utterly, creatively magnificent. Instead of showing this though, we show "new rules," new heart languages that "can't be spoken", wordlessly communicating ideas about how God can only be reached with Western ways and that the LIFE of their community might be bad. His heart, though, is for all to know Him, and to express that seeking, knowing, learning, teaching, and worshipping out in the context of the culture that He has lovingly planted them in.

Scripture Use is teaching me to empower local artists and believers in any culture to engage with what the Word says, so that they can create for their church Body, for themselves, for their local radio programs, for their children's church, so that ALL might hear inside the glorious nuances of the cultural soil their hearts and identities have grown in, and so that we do not squelch what the Spirit is doing by presenting the Bible in a form that will cause great harm, misunderstanding, pain, or sharp mis-teachings simply because we didn't know enough about the people, the history, and the culture before we thought we could use certain words or forms and assume that they would communicate the same thing.

All this to say, my head and my heart are so full....so prayerfully FULL of new things to step boldly and delicately with. It has been so encouraging to take all this in, and to know that even though this spills a daunting light onto the intricacies of the task, it also shows me more of my Lord's glimmering sides.

In the process of this learning, I got to take part last week in something truly special at school... For the first time, the Canada Institute of Linguistics threw a sort of community-party focused on celebrating Scripture, and presenting some "commissioned artworks" that our class's students presented - [ask me about "mine" sometime, and I'll tell you about this great kid named Isaiah that rocked a piece of Spoken Word Poetry via video, and the process we underwent to make it happen!!!]..  

So the Celebration included a group of us as presenters to a crowd of around 250 people, as well as a cyclists' "Ride for Translation" in the morning, that did an incredible job or raising funds for future CanIL student scholarships, a lunch banquet, a Parade of Nations, and several mini-modules that guests could choose from about Linguistics topics like Phonetics and testimonies to what it's like serving in closed-countries...

Below are some photos taken by the incredible Jacob Bowdoin and Moss Doerksen, to give you a glimpse into the day.