Translating the Bible into exotic & rare languages

Fritz Goerling sits at his desk in a neighbourhood of Munich, Germany, making clicking and smacking sounds with his mouth.
'We have hardly any letters in our alphabet for such sounds,' said Goerling, a specialist in translating the Bible into exotic languages.

The sounds he makes are common in the language of the Jula, a small African ethnic group, but they didn't exist in written form until Goerling developed them. The project took 25 years starting when Goerling, with the help of a few Jula from Ivory Coast, learned the language. Matching symbols were borrowed from the international phonetic alphabet and taught to local people in the ethnic group. The reason for all the effort is to ensure that the Jula have a written copy of the Bible.

Demand for versions of Christianity's essential book in native languages spoken in all parts of the world is increasing, particularly in Africa. We want to reach people in their native tongue because it is the language of their heart,' said Goerling, 67. Many Jula know the Arabian script, but it lacks vowels for many spoken words. Thus, there was no word for an integral word like temple, for example.

However, translating something from one language into any other language is not a simple task - nuances from both the word-meaning level & the syntactic level need to be dealt with, and this can be more challenging in some languages than others, depending on the language you are translating from, into the language you are translating into.

Translation can easily be turned into nonsense - what makes sense in one language, syntactically, may make absolutely no sense in another language. This is also true phonologically - in the spoken language of the Jula there is the word 'ba,' which has three different meanings depending on the emphasis used to express it. In a low voice (or low tone), the word means mother. When the word is spoken in a middle-range (mid-tone) it means river, and when it is spoken in a a higher voice (high tone) it means goat. A mixup (however unintentional) can be quite insulting.

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The Hebrew hotline: Keeping an ancient language modern

Modern Hebrew, which can now be heard everywhere on the streets of Israel, has continued to evolve since it was reintroduced as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda is the man many credit with reviving the Hebrew language more than 100 years ago. Ben Yehuda's son, Itamar Ben Avi, was the first native Hebrew speaker. He had a thoroughly miserable childhood - home-schooled, locked up by his parents, and not allowed to play outside with other children so that he would not be exposed to any other languages. Itamar was three-and-a-half when he spoke his first Hebrew word.

Part of the difficulty in bringing an old language back to life was that, well, life had changed. The words that existed in the Bible often described rather grand ideas like love, war, and peace. But that was no help when trying to get shopping done - there were no words back then for ice cream or jelly, or underwear. So Ben Yehuda and his friends simply made them up, using old Hebrew roots to hint at the new words' meaning. And that process is still happening today.

The modern Hebrew language is growing all the time with around 20 new words being officially added each year. Approving these new words can be a lengthy process. A committee has to consider them, and it can take several years to reach a decision. And even after all that - there is no guarantee that the public will accept the words. Language is a sensitive issue in Israel. It is even discussed in the Knesset.

In 2005, Israel's then prime minister Ariel Sharon chastised Israelis for using the Arab-English hybrid expression "yala bay" to say farewell to each other (you hear it everywhere in Israel). Instead, Sharon argued, they should be using what he referred to as "the most beautiful word", shalom.

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Language Diversity Index tracks global loss of mother tongues

For the past several years, we have been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages – how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua, an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life through research, education, policy, and on-the-ground work.

”But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages,” Maffi adds. “The ILD shows in quantitatively rigorous ways what the trends have been over the past 30 years in the numbers of mother-tongue speakers of the world’s languages–and the news is not good: an overall decline of more than 20 percent in that period alone.”

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