The Bible Society’s Mother Tongue Translation Project

A high rise near the old part of San­xia in New Tai­pei City serves as a base for translating the Bible into Taiwanese. On a summer afternoon, clergy from Tai­pei, Tai­chung, ­Chiayi, Tai­nan, Ping­tung and Hua­lien gather here, as they do every Monday.

On arriving, the translators take their seats around a conference table on which are piled Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and other Bibles, as well as a variety of dictionaries. Turning their heads to a projection screen, they discuss the most suitable translations of various words and phrases. A designated member of the group records agreed revisions on a computer.

Bible consultant Rev. Liang Wanghui is constantly scurrying north and south to meet up with various translation groups. She has amassed a thick stack of high-speed rail tickets.

The gathering continues with three sessions a day, finishing on Wednesday afternoon. The group meets without fail every week. After 30 years’ hard work, a modern Taiwanese translation of the New Testament plus the Book of Psalms and the Book of Proverbs was completed in 2012. It went to press this year. Now the committee is working on the Old Testament.

According to Reverend ­Liang Wang­hui, a translation consultant for the Bible Society, the group tackles 50–100 Biblical verses each week. Simple narrative passages can be translated more quickly, while more poetic verses take greater effort. Sometimes, when opinions differ, a single line may end up being discussed all morning. At the current rate of progress, the translation of the Old Testament will take about eight more years to finish.

Similar groups, working on translations into Aboriginal languages, meet in locations throughout Taiwan. The Tsou group meets in the shadow of Ali­shan in Chiayi, the Ru­kai group in Ping­tung’s Wu­tai, and the Amis group usually in Hua­lien or Tai­tung. The Pai­wan and Bu­nun tribes are more far flung, so their translation groups meet in various locations.

Currently, over 20 translators are working for the Bible Society throughout Taiwan. Each has an appropriate theological and linguistic background and has undergone training. The Aboriginal­ translation groups especially rely on the linguistic expertise of tribal elders. Moreover, three translation consultants travel around the island helping to resolve translation issues and authenticating that the resulting texts are in keeping with the true spirit of the Bible.

Liang Wang­hui consults on the Taiwanese and Tsou translations. From her home in Kao­hsiung, she travels a circuit to Tai­nan, ­Chiayi and Tai­pei. “According to United Bible Societies regulations, a target language must be representative enough to merit a Bible translation,” explains Jessie Hsu, publication director at the Bible Society. “Both in terms of the number of target languages and the number of translation consultants, what the Bible Society in Taiwan has done has rarely been done elsewhere, demonstrating the enthusiasm for this work among the people of Taiwan.”

Bible translations help to preserve mother tongues. The versions completed by foreign missionaries since the 17th century serve today as linguistic treasure chests for scholars of Taiwan’s native languages.

The first Bible Society was founded in Britain in 1804. Later, local societies devoted to translating the Bible into native tongues sprang up worldwide under the aegis of United Bible Societies. With various languages carefully recorded in translations of the many texts that make up the Bible, the resulting works have become an important anthropological and linguistic resource.

The Bible Society in Taiwan was established in 1956, and has achieved some impressive results in the intervening 60 years. Its Tai­pei office is chock full of different translations of the Bible going back as far as the 17th century. Researchers from Academia Sinica and universities often come to peruse its holdings.

The most precious of these is a 17th-century edition of the gospels according to Matthew and John in Dutch alongside a translation into the Sirayan language made by the Dutch missionary Daniel Gravius. In recent years Taiwan has experienced a movement to revive lowland Aboriginal languages. Sirayan disappeared more than 200 years ago, but the Romanization system Gravius adopted to record the language provides a passage back through time for researchers.

Because most of the early translators were foreign clergymen, side-by-side versions have always been a special feature of Taiwan’s translated Bibles, most often with a native language written in Roman letters placed alongside Chinese characters.

The group of clergy handling the Bible’s translation into Taiwanese carefully consider the meaning of each biblical passage. They strive both for full accuracy and for elegant phrasing.

Rev. Weng Hsiu-kung, chairman of Taiwan’s Bible Society, notes that people experience their strongest ties in their mother tongue. Reading the Bible in it evokes the deepest emotional resonance and psychological connections. Hence the Bible must advance with changing times and language, to stay close to contemporary people’s hearts.

Currently, many Taiwanese still use the Amoy Romanized Bible, of which the New Testament translation was completed by Rev. Dr. Thomas Barclay, a Scot, in 1916. But now, 100 years on, most young people can’t understand much of its vocabulary. Consequently the Bible Society 30 years ago started making plans for a translation into modern Taiwanese.

Weng says that Bible translation is much more demanding than most translation work. It’s not just a matter of conveying the basic meaning elegantly; one also needs to attain 100% accuracy. Every passage must be the equivalent of the original both in function and meaning. The society’s translators even check their translations against the original with modern translation software, looking for similar word counts of certain vocabulary.

A good translation of the Bible must read smoothly, be understandable to all native speakers, and convey the full beauty of the language. For the Modern Taiwanese Bible, much traditional literary vocabulary is being translated into the modern vernacular.

One of the Bible’s most beautiful passages is 1 Corinthians 13:2: “If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” The group struggled to find words and phrases in Taiwanese that both conveyed the meaning and had a suitable poetic cadence.

Thanks to the hard work of the Bible Society in Taiwan, translations of both testaments into Taiwan’s mother tongues have been released one after another.

As for Aboriginal languages, although early on there were many Bible translations by foreign missionaries, most were incomplete or used too many foreign loan words. The Bible Society has taken on the daunting task of revising those translations so that the new versions contain as few loan words as possible. That has necessitated even more emphasis on fieldwork.

An Amis translation of the old and new testaments was completed in 1997, and a revised edition came out in 2005. The process of translating it demonstrates the challenges of translating the Bible into one of Taiwan’s Aboriginal languages.

Aboriginal languages have little in the way of abstract legal, sociological or religious vocabulary. In the past, tribal elders would use Japanese to convey such concepts. Now, with more emphasis placed on sticking with the mother tongue, a variety of competing considerations must be balanced.

For instance, the concept of “righteousness” frequently appears in the Bible. For the Amis version, translators used words that are typically translated as “justness” or “fairness.” Only when they truly couldn’t find an Amis word close to the intended meaning, would they resort to foreign loan words.

Sing ’Olam, an Amis who is on the board of the Bible Society in Taiwan, argues that since young people these days have only limited abilities in their mother tongues and since many languages are rapidly disappearing, when the society discovers that translations are too far removed from the language of everyday life, revisions should be considered. Moreover, side-by-side mother-tongue and Chinese translations should be published, so as to better suit modern-day life in Taiwan.

“There are about 140 Amis churches throughout Taiwan,” says Sing ’Olam. “We encourage all of them to conduct their services in Amis. Currently, 95% of those congregations are striving to increase the use of Amis, and are thus helping the cause of reviving the mother tongue for the whole tribe.”

Rev. Weng Hsiu-kung, the chairman of the Bible Society in Taiwan, has played a key role in pushing Bible translations here.

The Bible Society also stresses that Biblical language should be living language. Apart from publishing side-by-side translations in Taiwan’s mother tongues (written using the Latin alphabet) and in Chinese, they are currently working on recordings, so that both elders with failing vision and younger tribespeople who aren’t familiar with the Romanized spelling of their tribal languages can immerse themselves in the word of God.

Recordings of the Bible in Taiwanese and Hakka came out first, in August. The entire New Testament can now fit onto an MP3 player. These are extremely easy to use, so that listeners need only to put on earphones or use a small speaker to hear the “Good Word.” The sonorous, undulating cadences of the readers, matched with appropriate sound effects, make these Bible recordings extremely popular.

“God and language are alive,” says the Bible Society’s Weng Hsiu-kung. “By letting God speak in Taiwan’s mother tongues, we can both enjoy His love and also show how to cherish our own languages.”