I talked Tuesday about Levites. I have some friends who are translating, too. 

We’re translating the Bible into __ because we believe that God’s desire is that people know the message He has chosen to give to mankind. God is the author of communication – good communication; communication that speaks to the heart and doesn’t cause confusion and doesn’t require education or further interpretation to understand and figure out. They can read the [trade language] but that is not their heart language. Therefore if we say they can only know God’s message by reading it in another language we’re in essence telling them God is a far away God who speaks in another language that is difficult to understand. This is not the way we believe our God is.

My friends are translating the Bible for a group of 24,000 people.

They learn the new language. They begin to find connections between concepts in the Bible and concepts in the culture. They start to write out words and phrases and paragraphs in the new language. As they go along, they do several checks with people of the new language. They check for whether the core of the meaning is present. They check for fluency, to see if the language flows. They check for comprehension, to see if the ideas come through. 

It takes a long time to get it right, to make it accurate and readable. But it’s not an academic project, like taking Spanish and doing the exercises. For the Levites, for my friends, the process of translation, of taking the words of God, words from God and putting them into a language that people understand is about life.

Why not leave these people alone? Isn’t this being colonialist? I know these questions. But what if you want to give these people a shot at deciding? To translate the words into their language so that they can decide whether this is about a God that loves them or not? That’s what these translators are doing.