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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