Missiology Translation and Culture

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Missiology Translation and Culture

• A Dissertation Presentation
• Mark GRD Smith

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Background my journey.

• Work Parish priest/ CPAS / Church Army
  evangelism training and missiology. Gospel
  Culture.
• MA Interpreting Studies Leeds (exposure to
  wider Translation Studies Interpreting Studies)
  agenda.
• Synthesis

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Evangelism

• The 4 Evangelists as a model
• A) Evangelism as persuasion or witness
• B) Evangelism as re-telling and interpreting the
  gospel.
• Matthew, Mark Luke and John demonstrated the
  importance of model B
• 4 gospel writers translate from North palestinian
  culture and Aramaic Language to wider world.

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Double Listening

• The importance of double listening in Mission.
• Listening to the gospel and to God
• Listening to the culture to the hearers need
  and position
• Mission becomes a bi-lateral interpreting of the
  gospel - dialogue

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Preaching and Interpreting closer than I think?

• Preaching in BSL retelling Bible stories
  interpreting to Deaf Community
• Interpreting the Bible interpreting liturgical
  text
• Sometimes I seem to be doing the same thing with
  but with different emphasis and different
  boundaries.

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Power Issues

• Some shared lessons from mission studies and
  translations studies
• Post Colonial Translation studies
• Notion of Diaspora in translation studies

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Diaspora

• groups and individuals dealing with cultural
  differences on daily basis.., intermarrying,
  mixing cultures .., growing up bilingual. and
  resisting (or succumbing to) pressures to become
  (or pretend to become) monolingual. A culture
  forever displaced, forever in exile, living
  among strangers (Robinson 1997)

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Case Study

• Forgive us our trespasses..
• As we forgive those that trespass against us

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Forgive us our Trespasses..

• Jesus Originally Spoke in Aramaic
• Matthew and Luke translated differently
• Matthew ophelemata obligations
• Luke amartias sins

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Translating Sin

• Chinese no concept like Western or semitic
  concept of sin
• Translators chose word zui crime (viewed as
  rebellion against the state)
• Christians persecuted because their Bible
  taught forgiving crime (regarded as sedition)

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Translating forgive

• Context in wider deaf community
• Deaf Leader - CN reckons a hearing sign
• Proposed substitution accept move on
• Theological evaluation
• Signs as identifiers or shibboleth

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Shibboleth - ?????

• And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan
  before the Ephraimites and it was so, that when
  those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me
  go over that the men of Gilead said unto him,
  Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, NayThen
  said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth and he
  said Sibboleth for he could not frame to
  pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew
  him at the passages of Jordan and there fell at
  that time of the Ephraimites forty and two
  thousand.

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Shibboleths some examples in BSL

• God
• Grace
• Christian
• Which sign we choose may mark us as belonging or
  not belonging to a particular group (similar to
  Gay Sign Variant

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Shape and Form of the Text

• Aramaic parallelism can reconstruct some of
  poetic form
• Do we translate one of Greek texts of the Lords
  prayer we have or a conjectured poetic original?

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Issues as choices

• Source Language and culture Aramaic, Hebrew,
  Greek , English
• The church culture (denomination)
• Target Deaf community
• Overwhelming choice so temptation to fall back
  to manually coded English SSE (but this
  priveleges English language and culture over BSL)
  and makes its own political statement.

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Sopme preliminary Conclusions

• Chaplains need a similar skill level to
  interpreters to interpret the gospel in their
  preaching both in BSL and transferable
  interpreting skills
• Deaf chaplains - important in our grappling with
  these issues of culture and language.
• Further study in the area of translation studies
  will help our ministry