In my last prayer letter, I mentioned the difficulty one translation team had in translating 1 Kings 10:7. I thought some people might be interested in knowing more details about it – why it was a problem and how we finally found a solution.
In this verse, the queen of Sheba tells about how she’d heard so much about King Solomon’s greatness, and says “the half was not told me”. That might sound pretty clear and straightforward, but we quickly ran into difficulties in translating it into Sara Kaba Dem.
If you have followed my ministry for a while, you will remember that our workshops are not translating sessions, but editing sessions. The team had already prepared a rough draft of the entire book of 1 Kings before coming to the workshop, and we were checking it over verse-by-verse to see what needed to be edited. For each verse, the translator, Job Hondo, read it first in Sara Kaba Dem so that the entire team could hear how the translation sounds. Then he translated it orally back into French to help me understand what the translation was saying (I had already received and studied a written back-translation, but it is helpful to do it orally too).
When Job came to 1 Kings 10:7, he started reading the rough draft, then stopped when he came to the part about “the half”. Even without looking at a Bible in any other language, he saw that the first attempt to translate it wouldn’t work, as it didn’t make sense in Dem.
“What does the Hebrew say here?” he asked.
The biblical text is pretty straightforward, and it was soon clear to everyone what it meant: “The half was not told to me.” But translating that into Sara Kaba Dem was another matter.
There were two hurdles to overcome. One is that there is no true passive voice in Dem; that is, they can’t say “was not told me”. They have to use the active voice: “did not tell me”. This lack of a passive voice is true of many languages throughout the world, and can sometimes make translation difficult. But in this case, the solution was not difficult. Although Sara Kaba Dem does not have a passive, they can use a verb in an impersonal sense - that is, without expressly stating who did the action: “[They] did not tell me.”
The second hurdle was much more difficult, and the translators puzzled together over what to do about it. The Sara Kaba Dem language, like many other languages in the Sara language family, does not have specific words for fractions, like “half” or “quarter”. They can say something like “one part in two” or “one part in four”, but that didn’t work in 1 Kings 10:7, as it is referring to words and not to a physical object or group of objects that can be divided up.
“We just don’t have a word for ‘half’ in our language!” the translators complained.
They tried another solution: “They didn’t tell me all of it.” This made good sense in Dem, but missed much of the force of the queen’s words, since “not all” doesn't exclude "most". According to the queen, she hadn’t even been told
half of the truth.
Sometimes, when we are stumped on a problem, it is better to make a note and come back to it later, after we’ve all had time to think about it. So we moved on to other issues for the rest of the day.
Later that evening, it occurred to me that I had among the files on my computer a copy of the recently edited book of 1 Kings from one of our other translation projects, the Sara Madjingaye language. This is an important Chadian language, used between different tribes as a trade language, so the Sara Kaba Dem translators can all read it quite well. Also, it is quite closely related to Dem and shares many vocabulary items and grammatical structures. So there was a good chance that they had already worked through the same translation difficulty in 1 Kings 10:7. Perhaps they had found a solution that would give ideas for how to translate the verse in Sara Kaba Dem.
So the next day, I pulled up the Sara translation of 1 Kings 10 and found verse 7. The Dem translators took a moment to read it. I can’t read Sara very well but was able to get the general gist of what it was saying.
“Ah,
nus!” the translators exclaimed as they read the Sara translation. Sure enough, the Sara translators had found a word that worked.
Even though I don’t know Sara too well, I recognized the word
nus (pronounced like the English word “noose”). It is not an original Sara word; it comes from Arabic, but it is commonly used to mean half or partial. For example, if someone is pouring you a cup of tea, and you don’t want a full glass, you say “
nus nus”. This Arabic word has also been brought over into Sara Kaba Dem and is pronounced
nusu.
At last, we had a word for “half” that would work. After just a few short minutes’ discussion, the Dem team had a translation of 1 Kings 10:7 that both made sense in Dem and kept the meaning and impact of the Hebrew text.
Here in Chad, we are surrounded by multiple ethnic groups, each with its own unique culture as well as its own language. This brings some interesting challenges, and it also means we have much work to do in Bible translation work! But in the case of 1 Kings 10:7, the fact that we have multiple Bible translation projects was a help, as some languages face similar difficulties and can help each other find a solution.
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