Workshop Notes: Isaiah in Sara Kaba Deme

Today I am looking through my notes from a translation checking workshop back in January, when we checked the first 43 chapters of Isaiah in the Sara Kaba Deme language.  For those of you who are interested in the details of translation work, here are some extracts of several problems we encountered as we edited this portion of the Deme translation.

MISUNDERSTANDING: Isaiah 1:8 "besieged city"

The word "besieged" is often confusing for the Chadian translators.  The word for "besiege" in French is assiéger which some translators confuse with siéger which means "to be headquartered".  As a result, the word often gets translated as though the army had already conquered and invaded the city, not sitting outside the gates attacking it.  Whenever I see this word, I have to be careful to check it to make sure the translators have understood and translated it correctly.

WRONG IMPLICATION: Isaiah 1:11 "I am full of the burnt offerings"

When translating the word "full" in the first draft of the Deme translation, they had used a word which has a positive implication, like when a person is comfortable and happy after a good meal.  But in the context of the passage, when the Lord says "I am full", it is in a negative sense: He has had enough of their hypocritical offerings and can't stand to have any more.  Therefore the translators changed to a word that has a less positive implication, like when a husband doesn't like the meal his wife cooked and doesn't want to eat any more of it.

UNNATURAL OR UNCLEAR WORDING: Isaiah 13:18 "the fruit of the womb"

The Hebrew idiom "fruit of the womb" was difficult to translate in Deme.  First they tried a very literal translation:

kana ngi ka tei 'j keme deɓee
fruit which goes out of the bellies of people

This was both unnatural and unclear in Deme.  They do not refer to offspring as fruit in this metaphorical way, so it wouldn't make very good sense to the readers.  However, they can use the word harvest as a metaphor.  Since a harvest is collecting fruit, it seemed like a good solution.

However, when we made the necessary change, we encountered another problem.  The expression for harvest in Deme is literally "gathering harvest people", and the word for "womb" was translated "belly of a person" so that the translation then looked like this:

 kam kōho deɓee ngi k tei 'j keme m deɓee
gathering harvest people which comes out of the bellies of people

To repeat the word "deɓee" (people) twice sounded awkward and unnatural in Deme.  So instead they translated womb as "belly of a woman".  This worked well and sounded smooth and natural in Deme.  So the corrected translation after our work looked like this:

kam kōho deɓee ngi k tei 'j keme m mandaá
gathering harvest people which comes out of the bellies of women

 It may not be good English, but it is good, clear Sara Kaba Deme!

 AMBIGUOUS PRONOUN: Isaiah 14:25: "then shall his yoke depart from off them"

In the context, it is pretty clear that "them" is referring to Israel, but in Deme this wasn't clear until they replaced the pronoun with the antecedent: "then shall his yoke depart from off Israel".  We often make this kind of clarification for pronouns (as long as antecedent is indeed clear in the context).  It is not removing or adding anything to the biblical text; simply translating it in a way that will be just as clear to the Deme readers as it was to the original Hebrew readers.

UNFAMILIAR OBJECT: Isaiah 38:8 "sundial of Ahaz"

There are several ways to handle translating unfamiliar words.  In Deme, the method we use the most often is to use a compound word or short descriptive phrase.  But it is sometimes difficult to find a phrase that is really clear.  The word "sundial" was hard, but finally the translators decided to say "thing to measure time".