Translating "The Fear of the Lord"

Just to give you a little taste for what happens in a Bible translation workshop, I'll just describe our discussion of one translation issue during my recent trip to southeast Asia. My mentor and the senior translation consultant, Cathy Hodsdon, was heading up the workshops. As a consultant in training, I was there mainly to learn how to do translation consulting work and help where I could. At first I mostly observed and helped to research translation problems; later on in the workshops, I was able to do more actual consulting.

On our first day of translation workshops for this particular Asian language, we launched into checking the translation of Proverbs. Since the last time Cathy Hodsdon had workshops with this language group, the mother-tongue translators had been working on a rough draft of Proverbs in their language. They use resources in the country's official languages and related local languages to translate the draft. During the workshops, we checked their draft against the Hebrew and made necessary changes. Thanks to the modern technology of computers and projectors, we could even project the translation on the wall so that everyone could see the changes as they were being made. This is so helpful in workshops that everyone wonders how we ever managed without it!

As we checked each verse, the translators carefully translated the draft back into English, so that we consultants could understand the content of the translation and know what questions to ask them. This is called the back translation.

Soon we got to Proverbs 1:7, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge..." Their back translation of the verse began, "The respect of the LORD..." This brought up a question in our minds. "Respect" in English is sort of a weaker word than "fear", and although respect is certainly involved in the concept of "the fear of the Lord", there is a sense of real fear as well, because even though we love and trust the Lord, we also know that He is holy and judges sin. A wise person fears this judgment. In any case, the Hebrew word is the common word for "fear" and it is not our job as translators to "tone down" the difficult phrases of the Bible.

Cathy has often told me that one of the main keys to translation consulting is knowing how to ask the right questions. This takes practice! For example, we could have said, "This is wrong. Change it!" or something to that effect. But that would cause more problems than it would solve, and would assume that we consultants know the translators' language as well as they do. Actually, Cathy does know quite a lot of their language, but as mother-tongue speakers, they are the experts! So instead, Cathy said, "Tell me about this word. You've told me in your back translation that it means 'respect', but what does it mean in your language?"

The translators explained that they have at least two words for "fear" in their language. One word means a negative kind of fear, like a terror for something you dislike or mistrust (like spiders, for example!). But the word they used in the translation is a more positive kind of fear, as you might have for a highly respected authority figure, like your boss or a policeman. They had used this word because they didn't want to give the impression that people should have a distrustful terror of God, but rather a respectful fear.

When they had explained the word and the reason they had used it, Cathy and I explained why we had asked the question and described the meaning of the Hebrew expression "the fear of the Lord". We all agreed that the word they had used was a good equivalent of the Hebrew, so we did not change it after all! The difficulty was only in the fact that their word was difficult to translate back into English, but our discussion was able to easily clear the confusion in just a few minutes, and we were soon able to move on to the rest of the verse.

Of course, there are cases where the word in the rough draft does need to be changed in order to be more faithful to the Hebrew text. In some cases, the translators have to spend some time discussing among themselves before they could find a clear and accurate translation. In really difficult cases, we might even have to move on and come back to it some other time, after we'd had a chance to think about it more.

As you can see, much teamwork, skill, and hard work is involved in Bible translation. Please pray for all us consultants and all the translators as we work together to give people the Word of God in their own language!