Translating for Generations

Some congregations in Papua New Guinea still don't have access to a Bible they can understand. In some cases, their language has no full Bible — some villages elders have gone to church their whole lives without ever hearing God's Word in the language they speak at home. In other cases, their language has changed so much that the village children listen to God's Word in a version of their language so out-of-date they cannot understand it.

On one visit to the translation teams working in Papua New Guinea, FIA sat with a Papuan team leader who trains Bible translators and oversees their translation projects. This team leader uses FIA to help his teams understand Bible passages before they create first drafts of their translations. He told us that after using FIA to create this first draft, translators immediately take that draft back to their communities for feedback. For some communities, listening to the draft is their first opportunity to hear God's Word in their heart's language. The trainer recalled watching the face of a 60-year-old woman as she sat with the rest of her church to give a new translation team feedback on their very first draft of a biblical passage. "I saw her face," he said. "It full of tears coming down. For the first time, she had heard the recording [of the Bible] in her own language."

On that same visit, we met other grandparents who had joined translation teams not for themselves but for their grandchildren. We sat with one team on the sand outside their church. In their village, their church is well established and their language already has not one, but two translations of the Bible. We asked why they planned to translate the Bible a third time. The oldest of their team, an older woman wrapped in a purple feather scarf, repeated the phrase "for the next generation" over and over as she answered. Their language, she explained, has changed so much over years that her grandchildren can't understand it any more. Their two Bible translations are written in this older version of the language. This grandmother wants her legacy to be a re-translated Bible that the younger generation, her own grandchildren, can understand.