TRANSLATION GONE WRONG:

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Slip of the Tongue

There are the weeks and months when the missionary translator is writing down hundreds of words in their notebook or on small pieces of paper. All these strange words must be memorized. The missionary may have asked for such a short word as 'bus,' to find the native give such a word as the Chichimeca gul'?us-we'doa-ko'pu?, literally 'a house that walks on the land.' Or perhaps the missionary has not even had the advantage of an interpreter. He has had to point at things, mimic all sorts of actions, and endanger his reputation for sanity in order to elicit some of those very hard words. A missionary among the Tarahumaras was trying to obtain the word 'jump.' He acted it out by jumping around the room. The natives responded with an expression; so he quickly wrote it down, only to find out later that it meant, 'What is wrong with you?'

But it is not enough for the missionary to write down the words; they have to be memorized and used. The only way to learn to speak a language is to speak it, even though the mistakes may seem tragic. For example, one missionary thought he was asking for help but was actually inquiring for a wife. That slip of the tongue made him a welcome guest at any gathering of the natives, for they seemed never to cease laughing at this and similar mistakes which he made.
(Bible Translating, Eugene A. Nida, Ph. D., American Bible Society, 1947, p 4.)



Poor Moses

Long and short vowels and syllabic consonants are always a headache to the missionary. But few people have gotten into quite so much difficulty in one sentence as a missionary who was preaching in one of the Bantu languages of West Africa. Instead of saying that "The children of Israel crossed the Red Sea and followed Moses," he declared that "The children of Israel crossed the red mosquitoes and swallowed Moses."( p 7)



Sleepy Jesus

With all the careful attention to details, there are always items which escape attention. One may discover, as one translator did, that one vowel on the end of a word had been omitted, with the result that the manuscript declared that Jesus was asleep 'behind the boat' rather than asleep 'in the back part of the boat.'(p 9)
(Bible Translating, Eugene A. Nida, Ph. D., American Bible Society, 1947.)