Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation impacts such as these are obviously tiny. French, English, Swedish, and Chinese have not been altered by them, just lightly massaged at the edges—at least, so far. But the translation of the Gospels into Bosavi, a language spoken by small communities of rain-forest dwellers on the Great Papuan Plateau, has had much more far-reaching effects.[114]

Before the Bosavi were converted to Christianity in the 1970s, their culture (somewhat like that of ancient Rome) did not recognize sincerity as a concept. It was what people said in public that was taken seriously; private thoughts and the conformity of outward behavior with inner states was not a concern. But sincerity—the correspondence between saying something and meaning it—is integral to the message that Christian missionaries brought. The Asia Pacific Christian Mission regarded vernacular languages as “the shrine of a people’s soul” and was therefore committed to teaching the gospels in Bosavi. However, none of the missionaries was a field linguist, and none became fluent in the language. In addition, Bosavi people in general spoke no other tongue: for trade contacts, they had always relied on speakers in bordering villages who could translate through a neighboring language and, in more recent times, on the regional contact language, Tok Pisin.

The missionaries used the Nupela Testamen, the New Testament translated into Tok Pisin—not from Latin or Greek but from the simplified English text called the American Good News Bible, first published in 1966, aimed at children and uneducated adults. Use of the intermediary language limited the mission’s initial contact to a small group of young Bosavi men who had worked outside the area and acquired some Tok Pisin. The missionaries taught them basic literacy and then set them on the road as missionizers themselves. At the rudimentary services these new converts organized in the small villages, they read aloud from the Nupela Testamen, then improvised an oral translation into Bosavi, either in small sections or after a whole passage. Given the translation method, it’s not surprising that they introduced many Tok Pisin words and ways of saying into Bosavi as they went along. But the true impact of these “language turners” lies at a deeper level than that.

Bosavi is one of the many languages that possess evidentials, grammatical forms that indicate how something is known—by sight, by hearsay, or by deduction (see here). Tok Pisin, by contrast, does not. So when it came to improvising a Bosavi version of the Tok Pisin version of the Good News version of a Bible story focused on the difference between what people thought and what they said, the newly minted Papuan missionaries had a huge problem, exemplified by the phrases in italics below:

Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Some teachers of the law who were sitting there thought to themselves, “How does he dare talk like this? This is blasphemy!” God is the only one who can forgive sins. At once Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he said to them, “Why do you think such things? Is it easier to say this to a paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Get up, pick up your mat, and walk’? I will prove to you then, that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, pick up your mat, and go home!”