Featured God's Providence and Bible Translation

Down through the years there were many who helped for a while, and then turned away to something else. A Japanese missionary to Brazil, a former student of mine in Bible School, helped for a while. A Japanese pastor wrote some very long exegetical footnotes that were unusable. A missionary I had known for many years and loved like a brother (still do), helped on the book of John until he decided that our work was lousy and incompetent. (That one hurt.)

The Lord brought to us various Japanese proofreaders at just the right time. My former student and member Furukawa San proofread the entire NT, and pointed out many corrections and a few better renderings. Two young Japanese ladies did a great job with most of the NT. Right now a Japanese rocket scientist who works for NASA is proofing several books for us.

God is in favor of missionary Bible translation. I have found that at the right time, for the definite need, God brings in the right people for the right task at just the right time. If a project is God's will, He has the right people for it!

 

Keep reading.

 

You may be wondering why my close friend said that our Gospel of John was incompetent. You may also wonder if he was right. Here is "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey of fond memory used to say.

My friend wanted us to up the level of politeness, especially when referring to deity. Now, Japanese has a ton of honorific terms (also called "respect language"). Here is a definition: "Pronoun, form of verb, etc., used in expressing respect for someone of higher social status" (P. H. Matthews, The Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, p. 178).

So, for example, you can say "thank you" in Japanese in many different ways, depending on the social status of the person you are thanking (though this is an oversimplification):
どうも。Lower in society; perhaps a child.
ありがとう。
どうもありがとう。
ありがとうございます。Same level.
どうもありがとうございます。Higher in society.
感謝いたします。
大変感謝いたします。
And so forth.

Here is the providential part. Our senior missionary sent me to the Tokyo School of the Japanese Language. TSJL has a wonderful curriculum put together by Japanese linguists and later revised, partly while I was there. In particular, their curriculum is very good with Japanese honorifics. So I was pretty well prepared for the honorifics of the language.

On the other hand, my friend went to a different school, one with a pretty good curriculum but some serious problems, Japan Missionary Language Institute. JMLI actually had a lost teacher who had quite a bit of seniority, so they couldn't fire her (a Japanese thing). I actually heard two students talking about her on a Tokyo train one day, and one said, "I believe there is a literal hell, but I've quit praying for that lady to get saved."

One day in class the teacher insisted that everyone say, "I like beer." My friend refused, being opposed to alcoholic beverages. For this terrible sin (not saying "I like beer") he got in huge trouble. Eventually JMLI refused to allow him to graduate, which was a dumb move, because he was later in the position of being able to recommend the school to ne missionaries! Not surprisingly, JMLI went bankrupt some time after that. Before that happened, though, they decided to give my friend a diploma--but he turned it down!

Now, to continue, one day I was translating with Uncle Miya, and suggested a very polite way to refer to Jesus. Uncle Miya immediately nixed it. He taught me that using too obsequious honorifics in Japanese is a way to subtly insult someone. Naturally, then Uncle Miya creatively insulted me in several polite ways to make his point!

My friend's problem with the Gospel of John we had translated was that it was not polite enough! But if we had done what he wanted us to do we would have been insulting the Lord quite often!

 

Just for Just_Ahead, here's a closeup of Uncle MIya pontificating--maybe telling me that my rendering is "Junior High Japanese" like he did that one time.

 

Here is a picture of one time that we had several others participating in our translation effort. You can see Uncle Miya, of course. Frank is probably taking the picture. I'm the guy in the back on the right. The other guy on the right was an excellent linguist, and had even taught Greek and Hebrew in the US, but he and Uncle Miya did not get along. But he was only there for furlough replacement, and later moved way down south to serve the Lord there.

Note the guy on the left nearest the camera. Brother Randy lived on our island, and was planting a church to the north of us. A wonderful missionary and linguist, he is the final editor of the project, producing the PDFs, adding corrections from the proofreaders, and finding many corrections himself. That's a very tough job, and I marvel that the Lord brought him into the project at just the right time. God's providence is wonderful! He also is the guy who liaises with the printer. He has overseen the printing and distribution of our "John and Romans."

The other missionary in the picture is a great guy, but has not been able to do a whole lot in the translation effort.

 

And, lest I forget, here is Frank with Uncle Miya and me. As you'll recall, he was in Air Force intelligence as a Russian linguist. When he first moved to Hokkaido, he used to go on Russian ships which often make harbor there, and pass out tracts. Then one day the Japanese police took him in for questioning, thinking he might be a spy. So much for that evangelistic effort, since his heart was with the Japanese.

 

One important area that non-translators rarely think about is the area of proofreading. If you publish a Bible, or even a test edition Gospel of John, if it is full of errors, that will mark the translation as flawed, and it might not be accepted.

One effort to produce a new Japanese translation from the TR floundered when it published a test version of the Gospel of Mark. (I have a copy.) There were so many errors that the translation effort never really recovered.

In our case, Brother Randy had a test version of John printed in 2011 after the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan. Randy and other missionaries and pastors took down a load of food and supplies to the devastated area, along with several thousand of our Gospels to pass out. (I did not go, since I was having painful knee problems at the time.) I had an email address folks could write to, but no one did. Hopefully, that meant that there were few errors in it.

At any rate, before we produced a "John and Romans" some years later, we proofread it thoroughly. About four different men on the team did the proofing, and I think it was a good job. In God's work, we must never be careless or lazy.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest" (Eccl. 9:10).

 

In the late 1990's our mission director came to Japan, and we had a wonderful all-Japan fellowship meeting. One day when the other missionaries and their families were all going out canoeing, Dr. F took me aside and encouraged me to finish an M.A. in Biblical studies I'd been working on for years, "because we need good missions teachers on the field and in the States."

I started taking some courses online, and finished the degree on furlough in 2005. In God's providence, my son finished the same degree at the same time, and we walked together. (We even took classes together!) He went on for an M.Div. at Calvary Baptist Seminary in Lansdale, then for a PhD under well known Greek scholar Dr. David Alan Black at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. (I use his textbook for Greek 101-102.) This further training was a great help in my translation work. I fully believe that a Bible translator should know theology, and no just linguistics.

"Dr. Paul," as many call him, became our translation consultant, and over the years has been a great help. I've talked to him countless times about grammar, semantics, theology, and many other things. He is also a great help in textual criticism, having been mentored at that by noted textual critic Dr. Maurice Robinson while at SBTS.

 

He was unique!

 

In 2014 we began considering and praying about retiring from the mission field and teaching in America. We had been missionaries 33 years, not counting deputation, and had gotten my MA, so we could possibly do it. That same year it happened.

Uncle Miya and I had finished the NT translation, and were working on the Psalms. If need be we could communicate long distance and keep working on them. Frank had retired from the mission field, but came back to do furlough replacement for us. At that time, Frank and Uncle Miya worked for a while on Psalms and Proverbs.

I sent my CV (Curriculum Vitae) to some schools, but got no answer. Oddly enough, my son with the PhD was also looking for a place to teach, having finished his degree. It was a really tough time to get hired at any college or seminary.

Then, the school where I now teach got ahold of me and held three phone interviews. In the first one the dean said off the cuff that they were actually looking for two profs! During the second one, with the VP, Patty stuck a note in front of my face, "Ask about Paul." With the third interview they hired me.

They also flew our son up to see the school and immediately hired him! God is so good--we have an awesome time teaching together: hollering between our offices in Japanese, sharing coffee information, giving fits to other staff members (nicely of course), and even team teaching together: "Pastoral Epistles" in the college, and "Translation Issues in Hebrew and Greek" in the seminary. (He handles the Hebrew, I the Greek.)

That's not all. Here is a wonderful example of how the providence of God works. There has long been a spiritual connection between our two family and that of our pastor (and school pres) here. I tell the whole story in my upcoming biography of John R. Rice, but here are a few points:

1. My grandfather performed the wedding of our pastor's parents and acted as the father for the pastor's mother, who was an orphan. At the time she was working for my grandfather.
2. When they were boys, my grandfather laid hands on and prayed for the two brothers of our pastor to become evangelists--and they both did!
3. Our pastor's father was a friend of the family, and was instrumental in introducing me to my wife.

There is much more that I could say about the two families, but you can certainly see God's providence in now He brought us back to the US and led us here to teach. God is so good!

 

Today we are waiting for a Bible translator to come and do a two day seminar for us on translation technology. He's a missionary linguist translating into [redacted for security purposes]. I'm the liaison guy, set up the whole thing. I sometimes wonder how in the world I got here, and teach two graduate level translation courses!

It's all in the providence of God. I have been asked why I did a NT translation into Japanese when there is already a conservative, literal translation in the language. I've told you our skopoi for the project: (1) To provide a modern Japanese NT from the TR, something that had never been completed. (2) To make it public domain, so no one had to ask permission to use it.

Moreover, God in His providence, which I was not aware of when it happened, also had it set for me to train translators someday. That was no goal of mine, nor a dream nor an ambition. It just happened. More about this on Monday--right now I've got to look out for our lecturer.

 

Here we are, twenty of us, in the first session of our Bible translation seminar. We all introduced ourselves one by one to our Bible translator, and now he is giving his own testimony. I'm awestruck at what God has done. There are three of us profs, six seminary students, three grads who work for us, one high school student called to be a translator, and seven undergrads.

Of the seminary students, we have three in the MA in Bible Translation: one Persian, one German, and an American. The Persian is already translating the OT into Farsi. We spent much time this past summer with our Persian in an internship, so I got to get a taste of Farsi. Fun stuff to me! It has a lot of words the same as Hebrew; for example, "corban" (Matthew 7:11).

P. S. One of our college grads just came in with his wife. He didn't go to seminary, but God directed him to the Rohingya refugees in Milwaukee. The Rohingya are a Muslim people group from Myanmar, greatly persecuted by the government there. There are 1000s of these people here, and they need a Bible, so we are taking tentative steps in that direction.

 

Our lecturer is on his fourth lecture now, explaining some peculiarities and translation problems of [redacted for security purposes]. For example, Greek has 2 words for "basket," but English only has the one. But [redacted for security purposes] has four words! And then you have the 12 baskets that held food after the feeding of the 5,000, but also the basket Saul was let down over the wall in!

Just for this lecture, we've told all the missions students to come, not just the future translators. As I look around the room, I see many students I've taught Greek to, some who are about to take it from me, and a few freshmen who will take it next year. This is thrilling to me. As I often tell the Lord, "I have a great gig here. Thank you!"

 

For some time, our church and schools have supported a church planting movement in Cameroon, Africa. Many of our folks have gone over there to evangelize, and some of our graduates are either already there or on deputation.

In 2016, the pastor and missions pastor sent me to Africa with the goal of fostering an oral Bible translation into Cameroon Pidgin. Traveling with me was a young seminary student who travelled inland to the villages who spoke the Beba language. (There are many languages and dialects in the country.) His goal was to gather data for a possible translation into Beba, something our team still dreams of.

I preached and lectured about Bible translation, and four young volunteers teamed with me to work on 1 John as a test effort. We had a great time, and the men accomplished a lot, with one of them later finishing the book. However, the effort had no central leader committed to the task long term, so that was all that happened. However, God used that experience to light a fire under me to train translators.

 

Here are some photos: me standing with a Fulani Muslim, the view from 6,000 feet, me and my translation team, a market.

 

We had been talking about the need for a master's degree in Bible translation in our seminary. We had a number of interested students, and qualified faculty. Some of us, faculty and students, had attended an in-house "team meeting" of a translation ministry, and were getting fired up about it.

Not long after my trip to Africa, the subject came up again in a faculty meeting, and I opened my big mouth: "When are we going to start offering this degree?" The pastor/president looked at me and said, "Okay, John, start setting it up." That surprised me. I really didn't feel like I was the man for the job--but I had blurted it out, so there I was, in charge of developing it.

Well, there were three of us: myself with a good MA and actual experience translating; my linguist son with six languages, two master's degrees and a PhD; Miss B. who knew a bunch of languages and was working on a good MA degree in linguistics under SIL. We began meeting and working out the curriculum.