The Bible is a very complex text to translate. As I draft new passages I routinely come across vocabulary challenges.
The latest challenge is also a grammar challenge:
But we said to him, ‘We are honest men; we have never been spies.
Gen 42:31
First is the vocabulary challenge of spies. I haven’t encountered anything like that in my language and culture study. If the Kovol people were still engaging in tribal warfare with their neighbours perhaps I would have heard about some spying or scouting happening, but that style of fighting ended two generations ago.
A default option is to take the noun “spies” and turn it into a clause. Something like “people who come to another country to watch secretly”. I’m also lacking a Kovol word for “country” though. We have a word for village… and that’s about it for human geography. Mandag town is called “ab hulum”, “the valley” for example. When people say they are going to the valley we know they mean town. It has been a challenge to translate the Joseph story not being able to say country or city; I’m always working around it!
In this case the workaround has been to have Joseph accuse his brothers of “coming secretly to look at the place”. When I sit with my translation helper on Monday I’ll have to see if that hits the mark.
The 2nd challenge is that the end of chapter 42 is a story about Joseph’s elder brothers telling their father what they had said to the ruler in Egypt. It is packed with quotes within quotes. The general format is “‘we said this to him and he said this to us’ they said to their father”. I have never seen anything like that in the Kovol language. I’ve become familiar with how they tell a story where one character says this and another says that. I’ve seen indirect examples of “I told this to so and so”. I have never seen a quote within a quote though, and suddenly I need them.
It becomes a bit of guesswork on how it is done. Again Monday will reveal if I’m on track or not.
With Genesis 41 drafted, checked through with a language helper and adjusted for naturalness, I was able to take it out this week for comprehension checking. I read it to someone who has never heard it a paragraph at a time and ask them to tell it back to me. Once they finish I ask questions about things they have missed or might not have understood properly.
And he made him ride in his second chariot. And they called out before him, “Bow the knee!”
Gen 41:43
This needed quite a bit of unpacking. The Kovol version reads “The king he had some horses. They tied the horses to a log and they pulled the king and he was going. He tied one for Joseph, then he went up and was going around. The king went and Joseph followed him and went. Work people went first and shouted. Shouted “Clear the road” they said.”
As I translate into English here I notice that I’m not 100% sure who tied what to whom. Did Joseph do the tying? Was it Joseph who was tied to the horse? Did Pharoah’s chariot end up tied to Joseph’s chariot and it pulled him? The big idea came across well in the comprehension check, but those details… I’m not sure.
No one at first talked about the men going ahead of Joseph and clearing the road. How to ask about that? In the end, I went for “So when you go to town and you’re in a bus, sometimes the bus has to wait for traffic right? Was that the same for Joseph or did he not wait?” To which people responded that no, he didn’t wait. He was doing the king’s work. Also, these men cleared the road ahead of him. They caught it then 🙂
The hardest verse in the end was:
And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphenath-paneah. And he gave him in marriage Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera priest of On. So Joseph went out over the land of Egypt
Gen 41:45
Wow, the names here. Foreign names are very, very hard to remember. It was no surprise then that people really tripped over this verse. They got the big idea, but the names were in one ear and out the other! That isn’t a problem at all. As long as they can say Joseph got a new name and a wife given to him they are tracking, but people get really worried when they can’t remember the names!
Here is the first time I’ve had to translate priest. We have no word for that. Tok Pisin has “pris”, but asking about that, I found that people know the word, but don’t know what the person does. I went for “he did work for a false god of Egypt” but my translation consultant pointed out that that’s too general a phrase. Prophets and evangelists also work for God, so the idea of a priest doesn’t come across. I need to rethink it and get the idea of making offerings to come across.
I needed to add that he worked for a “false God of Egypt”. Initially, I just had “A god of Egypt”, but people are lacking the background knowledge that the ancient Egyptians were polytheistic. They were thinking that the priest was a priest of Israel’s God because God means God.
So much to keep in mind!
In other news there was a big landslide that covered over the stream our kids paddle in every Sunday. Instead of paddling in the water this week, our kids enjoyed a mudslide 🙂
We also had a friend visit with a stinking cold. He was hoarse and croaky. I sat with him for a while and Alice and Millie came. Seeing our friend was sick I suggested to them that they fetch their “puppy doctor set”. Millie came back down with a veterinarian play set and proceeded to give our friend injections, checked him with a stethoscope and made him eat imaginary medicine. Hopefully, he’ll get better quickly!
0 Comments