Wampanoag Bible Translation

This past Monday, I took a day off to visit Plimoth Plantation, a famous historical recreation of the 17th century life of the early Pilgrims and Native Americans. One of the biggest attractions of the place is that the recreated 17th century settlement features actors who play characters of the 1600's, and consistently stay in character. So if you ask one of the Pilgrims in the village about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, they'll tell you they've never heard of them!

There is also a recreated home of a Wampanoag family. The Native Americans who work here do not play 17th century roles, because they want to be able to answer any questions about Native American life and history. When I visited Plimoth Plantation as a teenager, the Wampanoag home site was my least favorite section, but this time was different. I wanted to find out about the Wampanoag language and whether they had a Bible translation. A Native American man (not one of the Wampanoag) gave me a lot of interesting information on his own language and other Native American languages.

Before I left, I looked through the gift shops for a souvenir. I ended up buying a t-shirt, but I also glanced through the copies of the plantation's magazine that were for sale. In the magazine was an article about the recreation of the Wampanoag language. At one stage, the language was dying out; i.e. hardly anyone spoke it as their mother tongue anymore. But now the Wampanoag people are working on reviving their language and teaching it to their children.

In describing the history of the language, the article mentioned missionary John Eliot's efforts to translate the Bible into Wampanoag. He had many frustrations. First he tried translating it himself. But the translation was awkward and difficult for the mother-tongue speakers to understand. He soon realized he needed Wampanoag speakers to translate it instead of himself, a foreigner. But there were problems with this too. According to the article, two Wampanoag speakers worked on translating the Bible, but they had difficulty understanding the idioms they saw in the Bible. Without adequate Bible training or a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, they often had to guess at what the strange phrases in the Bible meant. Then they translated their guesses into Wampanoag, with interesting results. For example, the expression "He gave up the ghost" was translated as "He gave away His ghost"! I don't know if John Eliot ever thought of combining his own Bible training with the Wampanoag speakers' expertise in their own language, but if he had, perhaps it would have been much easier to produce a translation that was both accurate and clearly understandable.

This historical account from a secular magazine provides a good example of why mother-tongue speakers and translation consultants are both so important in Bible translation work. Like any other ministry, our ministry is most effective when we together as a team. With the Lord's help, we seek to use the different abilities that God has given us to make sure that the translation that is produced is as clearly understandable, natural-sounding, and accurate as possible.