What gets you excited when you work with others in Bible translation? No one comes to the Bible with a full understanding of its depth, especially less experienced translators, so it is exciting when I can help them apply exegetical principles to a text and see them come to understand it in a more complete way. Then there is the challenge of translating that text. Quality Bible translation is like finding solutions to an endless series of puzzles. It is exciting to help people find solutions, or at least possible solutions, that they can submit to community testing. And if community testing shows people can finally understand the passage and can discuss how it applies to their own lives, values, and beliefs, then that is very exciting.  

What is your consulting philosophy? Philosophy: I believe a translation consultant should bring to the table a deep knowledge of the books of Scripture being translated and the translation issues common to these books, as well as the biblical language involved. This means the consultant should generally limit their services to those books or genres or languages they know well. For example, although I can work with Hebrew, I don’t know enough about translating Hebrew poetry to qualify as a consultant. I leave that to people better qualified than me.

Ideally the consultant should focus on one language family and be familiar with the grammar and lexical semantics of that language family and the commonalities of culture that inform the semantics, and the translation problems that that language and culture present. The experienced consult will then bring to the table a knowledge of the issues that other translators have faced in similar languages, the solutions they tried that didn’t work, and the solutions that did work. I liken a consultant to a bee that visits many flowers, collecting pollen from one and sharing it with another. Much of my expertise comes from what I’ve learned and observed from working with translators, and I can share their insights with other translators who face similar challenges.

A key method is asking the translators insightful questions. This leads them to recognize problems in the translation and discuss solutions that might be better. But the goal is not just improving the translation during the consultant session. My chief goal is to train the translators to ask those same questions of themselves as they do the work of translation.

We begin with prayer. And when it’s difficult to find a solution or decide between multiple wordings, we ask the Lord to guide us. Sometimes I put a chair for Jesus at the table as a reminder that we’re dependent on Him for guidance. We don’t need to pray formally all the time; we only need to ask the Lord to help us with whatever thorny issue we’re discussing.

Practical philosophy: I also recommend to translators that they put chairs at their translation table for people they know and want to reach with the Scriptures, like a mother or grandmother, a sibling or friend, a son or niece. I sometimes do this at a consultant session as well. Then I sometimes ask the translators whether those people can understand a particular wording correctly. And if there are naïve speakers available, we ask them, but there is also a need to see the results of community testing.

What translation resources do you really value? Paratext, BibleWorks (no longer available for sale), BibleGateway for its wealth of translations and study Bibles, and my own library of reference works, both digital and in print.

How do you share your translation discoveries with others? I published articles in the past, and now I make presentations where appropriate. But most of my sharing is via email, usually in response to questions from translators or consultants. A senior translation consultant should not only be a researcher and trainer but also a person to whom other consultants can bring their questions and disputes.

What are your top tips for someone starting on a career path in Bible translation? Work with translation consultants from the beginning, as well as engagement consultants. The consultants can help you get started on the right path, and they are available via email to answer questions or discuss issues that arise.

What do you see as the place of the church in Bible translation? Looking at history, we see that with only a few exceptions, translations have been done by individuals. An early exception is AD 382, when Pope Damasus asked Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels, for which there were multiple versions by unknown translators, and also the Psalms. Then Jerome went on to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin. But the Pope didn’t pay him; his translation work was financed by private supporters, particularly Paula of Rome. As happens with most new versions, people were hesitant to abandon their traditional version in  favor of the new one, and the Roman Catholic church didn’t make Jerome’s Vulgate their official translation until the 16th century. As for Luther, he had to hide his location while translating, and so did Tyndale.

The King James Version is one of the first translations that was undertaken and approved by an institutional church. Today, however, the Roman Catholic Church is active in translations, while most Protestant translations involve parachurch organizations. These organizations are essential to facilitating quality translation, but the language belongs to the believers in the community that speaks that language. It is their language, their community, and their friends and relatives whose eternal destinies are at stake. So the ideal is to work with respectable and well-motivated believers in the language community who want to produce a comprehensible translation in their own language for the purpose of edifying themselves and reaching their community. If churches of other language communities can work together to this end, that is ideal, but the translation is for the target language community and should ideally be owned and guided by the believers in that community who speak that language.

What would you say to young/aspiring translators? First of all, acquire a good knowledge of the Bible, basic linguistics (especially cognitive semantics), and basic cultural anthropology, because lexical meanings are concepts that are constructed and shared by members of a culture. And plan on getting further training in these fields whenever opportunity allows.

Then learn the features of the target language’s cultural and linguistic features to the extent possible. Remember that they are the ones who best know their own language and culture, but some of that knowledge is subconscious and needs to be drawn out or simply observed. Hopefully you can help them do that.

Any other comments? In selecting people to train as translators, in addition to the spiritual, intellectual, educational, and moral qualifications needed for God’s servants, there are some cognitive traits that are particularly needed for this role.

The person needs to have a good grasp of cultural relativism and be as free as possible of its opposite, which is ethnocentrism. To some extent this can be learned. It enables a person with ToM skills to learn other cultures and ways of thinking and then construct a realistic ToM for people in those cultures and interpret them accordingly.

This combination of abilities is needed for good cross-cultural communication and for effective cooperation in a diverse team. More importantly for translation, these abilities are needed in order to exegete Scripture accurately and translate it accurately and comprehensibly. Consultants need this for evaluating a translation. The need for abilities like these led Eugene Nida to say that “Good translators are not made, they are born.” But that’s an overstatement, because they need training, mentoring, and experience, in addition to these cognitive abilities, along with humility and a receptivity to guidance from the Holy Spirit.