8 years of long and winding road building a competent team to translate the Bible well

8 years ago the Ashɛ Bible translators thought they had finished Luke’s gospel. I was advising them and helping them prepare it for a final detailed prepublication check, and I wanted to get some answers about the narrative flow of Luke’s gospel in the Ishɛ language, questions that the translators couldn’t reliably answer about their language. I had questions like “When should you use a conjunction?” or “What do sentences look like in Ishɛ?” or “When is it good to start a sentence with a time phrase, location or reason?” 

We started trying to get the Ashɛ translators Gideon and Arams to collect some original stories to study. After some false starts with texts that were too short, or had been translated from another language, or hastily cobbled together, we realised we needed to make some recordings of original stories. I already knew from previous project experience that was always harder than you might think. 

A couple of years before a pastor (Rev Yari) in the community had been in Jos to help with the project and someone recorded an hour and a half video of him telling histories in the Ishɛ language… at 3am! (Not quite sure what they were doing at that early hour, but it was like some kind of wild history party.) With charming naivete I asked Arams to start transcribing that. Poor guy – his efforts were very valiant, but it was a massive challenge, and far too big for a first transcription effort. Sadly by this time Rev Yari had recently died, so it was harder to clarify what he meant at points.

So it was back to the drawing board for texts. One day Gideon told us his neighbour had killed a python that had been eating a Fulani man’s ram, and I asked him to tell that story in Ishɛ. That became text 1. Another time he was massively delayed coming to Jos because of the river flooding his farm, and we recorded his explanation of what happened. Gradually we started making a little progress.

Aiming for 10 with a variety of styles (history, fable, eye-witness), we eventually wound up with 8 reasonable texts recorded, which we then proceeded to transcribe and analyse, with a third translator Moses joining us. The translators told some stories and Arams found an old couple living near him who recorded a story each in their houses, together with all the usual household background noises.  

Absolutely everything was harder and took longer than you might reasonably expect. 

Transcribing the recordings. Checking the transcription. Agreeing on spellings and punctuation. Dividing into clauses. Dividing each clause into a discourse analysis chart. Tracking how participants were referred to. Figuring out how to handle bits of grammar that had never popped up through elicitation or translation. Figuring out how to handle bits of Hausa that crept into some stories.

Fortunately we had guidance from a discourse specialist Kathleen who had varied experience of translation (not just of the Bible) and studying storytelling.

At one point Arams said to me “If I had known what we were going to do with these stories I would have found better ones” but we had enough to get started at least.

We learned enough about speech and using pronouns and mini-pronouns (called indexes) and conjunctions that we were on the cusp of making some substantial improvements to the text of Luke’s gospel, when I had to travel for a home assignment and then Covid struck and the team was disrupted for most of a year, just when I thought we were nearly done with the discourse study. Recovering the project and getting back to revising Luke was challenging because Catechist Moses needed to devote himself to the church work, and Gideon had left along the way so we were down to one trained translator, Arams.

Gradually more people were recruited to join the team, but they had to learn all the basics about reading and writing Ishɛ, which was really a little more complicated than they expected. We did what we could to implement the improvements and we launched Luke’s gospel in March 2022, but it was clear the new team members who joined needed to learn where these ideas about Ishɛ storytelling came from. It wasn’t good enough for everyone just to accept anything that Arams or I told them about how their language worked; they needed to understand it for themselves. Otherwise we were little better than a team with one translator and one adviser.

I remembered Arams’ comment about how he wished he had known what we would do with the texts so we could get better ones, and I also learned that the best Ashɛ storytellers are older women, while men (opining in football viewing centres and writing in newspapers) often bemoan the dreadful way that modern technology and ways of life are eroding storytelling in the language. So in February 2023 after some considerable efforts we planned a storytelling and reading competition, making sure to invite women from a variety of towns and villages. Last minute venue changes and a country-wide lack of cash threatened disaster, but in the event five women gave (fictional) stories which were very well received by the growing audience of men, women, young adults (youth) and children. 

We recorded the stories on 2 phones with external mics placed as close to the storyteller as possible, and a DSLR camera. All the recordings worked. I asked my colleague Sheri to record a rehearsal for each storyteller outside the venue just before the actual storytelling, but to our surprise they only gave briefest summaries then, while their delivery was expressive and expansive when faced with a real live audience.

One of the storytellers had already recorded another story in her home, so we now had 6 more texts, which we had (visual) evidence for being well received and understood. 

We used these very stories for the next stage of translator training. They were much longer and more varied than most of the other stories we had recorded and transcribed, and again everything took longer to do than we might expect. Almost 2 years later, we have transcribed, checked and analysed four (and added a historical eye-witness account of a petrol tanker tragedy in the town of Katugal some 20 years ago). The new translators learned a lot about how the language they speak every day works. And as we worked on the new texts, the new translators were then able to understand work done on the previous texts.

Of course we have been doing more than studying the stories and historical accounts, but this work in natural texts has laid the groundwork for everything else. Out of that we have noticed spelling rules that need to be clarified (rather than dodged, as translators might do), we’ve noticed grammatical areas we need to work on, and it has given us some of the language, skills and teamwork practices we need to approach studying the Bible and taking its stories seriously. We’ve been learning some Biblical Greek at the same time, and learning oral bible storying methods, which all build up the skills translators need.