Translating Seasons

I have found that translating words for seasons of the year can be quite confusing in Chad.  Chadian seasons don’t line up the same as Middle Eastern seasons at all.  So for example, in Israel, July is in the summer, which is the dryest season.  January is in the winter, which is the rainy season.  Even though Chad has two seasons and not four, Chadians would also think of July as being in the “summer” and January in the “winter”.  So far, so good.  But then comes a catch.  In Chad, July/summer is in the rainy season, but January/winter is the middle of the dry season!  The times of the year for planting and harvesting are also different in Chad than in Israel.

This makes it quite confusing to translate when the Bible starts talking about harvest and planting and rain and heat and cold.  If we aren’t careful, the translation can actually end up unintentionally saying the exact opposite of what the Hebrew text says.  It gets so confusing at times that as we check the translation, we often have to refer to a chart that shows how the seasons and planting/harvest times in the Middle East line up with the months of the year.  We often have to discuss it quite a bit before we can decide how to translate the biblical term in a way that accurately reflects what the text is saying.  I will give a couple of examples.

Summer

We have to be very careful when translating the word "summer".  You might think that it would be enough to say something like “hot season” but this doesn’t always work in the context of the passage.  

In Israel, summer includes three events that happen during the same time of year: the hot season, the harvest, and the dry season.  But in Chad, these things don’t happen at the same time of the year: the harvest is at the end of the rainy season, and the hot season is in the latter half of the long dry season. So there are words for hot season, harvest, and dry season, but nothing that means all three.  This means we have to be careful what we are saying when we translate the word “summer”.

For example, when it says in the book of Proverbs that "he who gathers in summer is a wise son" there it means summer as the harvest time.  In Chadian languages, if we said “he who gathers in the hot season” this would mean the very hot, very dry season in Chad, when the fields are producing nothing.  It would completely omit the point of the verse, which is saying that a person should work diligently to gather his food during harvest time, while the fields are producing abundant food.  So instead the Chadian languages have to say “he who gathers in the harvest time”.

So we can’t always translate “summer” in the same way.  We actually have to use three different expressions, depending on the context: hot season, or dry season, or harvest time. Each time we see the word "summer", we have to decide which of our three terms we need to use ... otherwise the translation will say quite the wrong thing!

Latter Rain

Recently I have been preparing to check the translation of the book of Hosea for one Chadian language.  Hosea 6:3 mentions the “latter rain” which is translated in the most popular French version as “spring rain” - a perfectly accurate translation in French, since the Hebrew word is referring to the last rain of the Middle Eastern spring in March-May.  The translators, seeing “spring rain” in the French, quite logically connected it with the light April-May rain we usually get in Chad.  The only problem is that in Chad this is the FIRST rain of the year, not the last rain.  So “latter rain” was translated “first rain”.  Hmm, it’s a good thing I have that chart of the seasons of the year in Israel: It looks like we are going to need it yet again!