In this episode of the CCL podcast, we hear from Susanna Baldwin, a Bible translator in Darwin. She speaks about her work on the Plain English Version, the challenges of Bible translation, and also helps us to think through what questions to ask when we are considering which English version to read.
Links referred to:
- Wycliffe Bible Translators
- The Plain English Version of the Bible
- Our October event: Who am I? The search for identity with Rory Shiner (23 October 2024)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 28:06 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: In this episode of the podcast, we’re going to be hearing from Susanna Baldwin. Susanna is a Bible translator in Darwin and she’s going to speak to us about the challenges of Bible translation. But she also helps us to think through questions we can ask when we are considering which English version we might choose to read.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to another episode of the CCL podcast, Moore College’s Centre for Christian Living podcast. Today, I’m joined by my friend Susanna Baldwin. Susanna is a graduate of Moore College and has been working in Bible translation in the Northern Territory.
Welcome to the podcast, Susanna! I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you became a Christian and how you came to be in Christian ministry.
Susanna Baldwin: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s nice to join you. I grew up in England in suburban north London. I grew up in a Christian family and so had been going to church all my life, and I’m one of those people who can’t really pinpoint a time when they started believing in God or the gospel. I’m very thankful to have had that strong Christian upbringing.
The church I went to with my family in London was a very old-school Anglican church: it drew people from far and wide who were united in their love for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. I grew up with a lot of Christian words, jargon and knowledge in my head, but it probably took me until my early 20s to start really solidifying that into practical living as a Christian.
That was very much helped by moving to a different church and hearing the Bible taught in a bit of a different way and in a different language, and meeting more Christian friends of my own age for the first time. Around my early to mid-20s, I guess I’d say I had a bit of a Christian growth spurt at that point. I became a lot more invested in my faith on a day-to-day basis, and more involved at church and interested in ministry activities. But I didn’t really have any thoughts about going into vocational ministry for a long time.
There was one time around maybe a couple of years after I’d moved to that church when I went to a talk given by someone from Wycliffe Bible Translators, who I’d never heard of at the time. In fact, I think up until that point, it didn’t even occur to me to think about how the Bible got into other languages, who did that work, why it was necessary, or anything like that. This man came and gave a talk about the work of Wycliffe in various different countries, and it really blew my mind. As I say, it was such a novel thing for me to think about—all these people around the world who actually didn’t have the Bible at all, and then people who were doing the work of researching those languages, living alongside people from different language groups and helping them translate the Bible into their languages.
At the end of that talk, I turned to the friend sitting next to me and said, “Oh, I think I can see myself doing that.” It was like those little lightbulb moments. After that, I literally went home and did not think about it again for about five years [Laughter]. So clearly I had a short attention span when I was that age!
Then in 2009, I moved out to Sydney for work. I was originally just planning to come for a couple of years and work there, and then that sort of evolved into a second job and I stayed on for a bit longer. Then a few years after I moved to Sydney, there was just a shortish period of time around the middle of 2011 where a number of different conversations, encounters and little nudges happened that really brought this idea of vocational ministry back onto my radar. People started to encourage or challenge me to think about whether maybe I should pursue some sort of ministry path.
Initially I was quite resistant to the idea. I was still very sure that ministry was something that other people did. My calling was in the secular workforce, and I really held strongly to that. But the more I thought about it, more I felt myself being kind of gently nudged in the other direction. In the end, in really quite a short space of time, I made the decision to quit my job, apply to Moore College and pursue theological training.
Also, I started to think through the question of, “Well, if I am going to go down the vocational ministry path, what would that look like? What would I best suited to?” I quickly ruled out a lot of things that I didn’t think I’d be any good at, or want to do. But this memory of that long-ago Wycliffe talk came back to me, and I thought, “Oh yeah, I do like words and languages and thinking about communication,” and I realised that maybe Bible translation was a good fit for my skills and interests. So I started to look up some contacts who were involved or had been involved in Bible translation, and plied them with questions.
The conviction grew on me that this is probably something that I could do, that I’d enjoy, and that would be useful for God’s kingdom. So that’s the direction I took.
The journey to the Northern Territory
PO: You’re currently in the Northern Territory, but that’s not where you were originally planning to work in Bible translation. Could you tell us a little bit about your circuitous route to the Northern Territory?
SB: Yes, it was a bit of a roundabout trip! When I initially decided that I wanted to work in Bible translation, my first thought was that I wanted to serve in Africa. I didn’t really have a good reason for that, but someone once said to me, “If you get a feeling about a country, it’s probably good just to run with it. There’s hundreds of places around the world where you could go, so if you think of one place, just stick with it, because I’m sure God can use you there.” I thought, “That’s good enough for me.”
I initially applied to work in Tanzania. I’d heard of a number of missionaries working there and felt like I’d got to know a little bit about Tanzania. There were some Bible translation projects going on there. So I was assigned to a team in Tanzania and then I wasn’t able to get a visa to go there, because the government was clamping down on visas being given to foreign workers. That was all a big process. We tried to appeal, but nothing really happened there. So in the end, I decided to pull the plug on Tanzania.
Then I refocused my thoughts on Ethiopia, which was somewhere else I’d thought about initially when I was looking at Africa. I got lined up to go and join a translation team in Ethiopia. I flew out to Addis Ababa on 11 March 2020, which turned out to be slightly bad timing, because this little virus situation that had been brewing in Asia suddenly and rapidly spread across the whole world. So in my first week in Ethiopia, the first COVID cases arrived there. Lots of public services started shutting down. The language school that I was going to go to closed down. The offices where I was going to be working also shut down. At that point, Wycliffe advised all their workers who were overseas to think about returning to Australia or other passport countries. So after ten days in Ethiopia, I was on my way again [Laughter]. Shortest start to a long-term mission trip ever! [Laughter] I head back to the UK for the rest of that year, I stayed with my mum, and I waited to see what would happen.
In Ethiopia, things really didn’t get much better there. The COVID crisis was getting worse, and then there was a bit of a civil war brewing as well, which didn’t make it ideal for new me to rock up and try to start life there [Laughter]. So that being the case, I started talking to Wycliffe about whether there might be an option for me to come and work in Australia for a bit, because I knew there was some language and translation work going on over here. I’d heard about another family who were planning to go to Mexico on their Wycliffe assignment, and got pulled back because of COVID, and they’d gone to the Northern Territory to do some interim work up there. I made contact with the team working in Darwin and my now-colleague and friend Cathy talked to me about this project, the Plain English Version, that she was working on and said, “This is something we could definitely use your help with, even if just for six months or a year.
I ended up coming back to Australia by some miracle of God: I got on a flight at a time when hardly any flights were going. There were about 10 people on the plane that I flew to Australia on. But I guess God wanted me to come back, so that was very encouraging! That was early 2021, so I’ve been in Darwin for about three years now. As you can see, my six months expanded out a bit [Laughter] and I think I’m probably committing to the medium-to-long-term here now.
The Plain English Version
PO: You’re working on the Plain English Version. Why are you working on that rather than one of the indigenous languages?
SB: Yeah, and this is a bit of a wrestle for us in many ways, because ideally, we don’t want indigenous people to be reading the Bible in a second language; we want them to be reading it in the language that speaks to their hearts. For most of our target audience, that language is not English. It really boils down to the fact that there are just not the people and resources available to start or sustain translation projects in all of the languages that need them. So the Plain English Version is, by our own admission, a little bit of a shortcut to try and create a translation of the Bible that is at least understandable and useable to a wide range of indigenous language speakers.
But also importantly, it provides a resource that they can use for their own translation work, because, as I say, there are a lot of indigenous Christians who are keen to work on translation, and often are doing their own translation work in their communities. But they need an existing translation to work from, obviously, to be able to do that. And in many cases, the best available Bible to them will be an English Bible, but many of the existing translations are just too complex. The language is too sophisticated for them to be able to understand clearly and for them to be able to translate it into their languages. So we hope the Plain English Version will really serve that purpose as well—of providing a translation resource that will enable more translation work to happen in indigenous languages.
The thinking behind the Plain English Version
PO: Tell us a little bit about this approach. What’s the thinking behind the Plain English Version (PEV)?
SB: The project began about 15 years ago. It was started by a man called Dave Glasgow. He and his wife were working in a remote Aboriginal community called Maningrida. They were there to help with Bible translation in one of the languages of Maningrida called Burarra. They completed a New Testament in Burarra during their time there. But as they were doing that, they found that other people in the community, even though they understood the Burarra language, didn’t actually want to use the Burarra Bible because it wasn’t their family’s language. They didn’t own that language. There can be a sense of if you speak someone else’s language, it’s actually like stealing their language. There’s interesting concepts around language, ownership, identity and so on. But the outcome of that was that a lot of the non-Burarra people in Maningrida weren’t actually using this translation that they had been working on.
So he started to think about how could he help people who are not from the Burarra people still be able to access the Bible in a way that they can understand. He developed this idea for the Plain English Version (PEV), which is an English translation of the Bible that’s really tailored to the kind of vocabulary, grammar, concepts and narrative devices that are relatable to people who speak indigenous Australian languages as their first language or second or third languages.
It’s quite a unique translation. It uses very small units of meaning, as would be the case for any second language resource that you’d create. It uses a vocabulary of around 3,500 words. These are all words that are familiar to people who speak indigenous languages and are the kind of words that they would use if they were speaking English to each other or to other people. The grammar structures, as I say, are the ones that mirror the grammar of indigenous languages. This includes things like only using simple, present, past and future tenses. As you probably know, English has a lot of convoluted ways to talk about things happening in the past or in the future—that maybe happened or might have happened. The PEV would try to pare that down to very simple grammatical structures.
One of the big things about indigenous languages is they mostly don’t have any abstract nouns. There are lots of abstract nouns in the Bible—things like “grace”, “faith”, “salvation”, “forgiveness”. We talk about them as though they’re a thing, but really, what we’re describing is an action or a state or some sort of intangible chain of events. In the PEV, we have to take those noun-like concepts and break them down into actions, which is an interesting challenge, because I think we all very easily throw these kinds of words around in our Christian vocabulary, but when you actually have to break it down and explain, “What is happening when someone forgives someone? How do you explain that as an action?”, that’s one of the mean features of the PEV.
The PEV also tries to put information into a more logical or chronological order. Sometimes you find in the Bible in stories, you hear a story, and then at the end of the story, you hear this bit of information that really belonged back at the beginning. We try and put that back into a more chronological order.
Similarly with some of the writings in the New Testament, Paul is quite renowned for convoluted sentences, and it can be a little bit hard to break down his logic sometimes. So in the PEV, we try and put everything into a very simple and logical order so that someone can read it through in one go and understand exactly what it’s saying.
Another aspect of that is that we try and clarify any information that is implied in the text and would have been understood by the original readers, but would not necessarily be understood by our audience. That might include things like filling in little gaps in a story, where it’s implied that something has happened in between two sentences, but it’s not actually said out loud, or explaining some of the more technical words that relate to, maybe, Jewish customs or histories. Things like “sacrifices”, “temple” or “Pharisee”, we would need to explain in the text what those terms mean. The translation is a lot longer and wordier than most other English translations. But it’s probably simpler to understand.
PO: Would you be able to give us a sample translation or something we can hear just to get a feel for it?
SB: Yeah, sure. I’ll read you the first few verses of Genesis.
PO: Sounds good.
SB: Genesis 1:1-5:
First of all, a long time ago, God made everything. He made the sky and he made the earth. He made all the things that are everywhere.
The earth didn’t have any shape. It didn’t have anything. It was covered with deep water. Everything was dark. It was dark all over the water. But God’s Spirit moved around on the top of the water.
God said, “I want light.” Straight away, light was shining everywhere. God looked at it and he saw that it was good. So God split up the light and the dark. He called the light “daytime” and he called the dark “night time”.
After that all happened, there was night time and there was morning time. That was Day number 1.
[Music]
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PO: Our culture is obsessed with identity: we’re often told, “You do you” and encouraged to live according to our “true and authentic self”, expressing publicly how we feel about ourselves internally.
However, the very idea of personal identity is inherently slippery. It encompasses things like ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, belief, educational background, profession and personality, but it’s not fixed: our identity can change through time, circumstance and even self-invention.
How as Christians should we regard identity? God created us as unique individuals; how does our creatureliness affect who we are? Furthermore, as sinners who have been redeemed and sanctified by the Lord Jesus and adopted into the family of God, how does Christ’s work change the way we view ourselves? How does the encouragement to “find your identity in Christ” actually play out in the complexities of competing sources of identity?
Join us for our next and final event in our series on “Culture creep” on Wednesday 23 October, when Rory Shiner, Senior Pastor of Providence City Church in Perth, will show us how losing ourselves for the sake of the kingdom will help us find ourselves once and for all (Matt 10:39). Register and find out more on our website: ccl.moore.edu.au.
Now let’s get back to our program.
Translation challenges
PO: You’ve touched on some of the challenges particularly in the New Testament in some of those epistles. What are the other things that you’ve found difficult or stretching as you’ve worked on the translation?
SB: One of the big things is, as I was saying, breaking down these theological or Christian jargon words that are quite embedded in our thinking, but we don’t often really try [Laughter] and get to the bottom of what do they actually mean? What is actually happening when God shows grace, or when Jesus forgives us, or when God saves us? There’s a lot of work to be done in digging into those concepts and making sure we explain them clearly, but also within the limits of the vocabulary that we’ve got to work with. That’s one of the challenges.
At the meta level, there’s always the sense of responsibility of we’re creating something that will one day be printed, bound and handed to people as the word of God, and so there’s a deep sense of responsibility to do that well. I guess it’s a matter of praying over every sentence and every stage of the process—praying that God preserves his truth and his message through what we’re doing.
Then more broadly, again, I think there’s always the challenge or the sense weighing over us of the scope of the task of Bible translation. The longer I spend in this field and the more I see, the more I feel—I try not to be overwhelmed or despondent, but there is so much work to do and that’s even just talking within Australia on languages that don’t yet have the Bible and where people would really love to have the Bible in their own languages. There’s a very strong Christian heritage and presence in many Aboriginal communities. People would love to have more help and support to translate the Bible. It’s probably the one thing that they’re really asking for from Western missionaries: Bible translation support. There are lots of Aboriginal church leaders who are very competent in running ministries themselves. But when it comes to Bible translation, there are skills and resources that generally just aren’t available to most remote indigenous Australians and communities. That’s where I think we can really step in and support our brothers and sisters in those contexts.
But as I said, there’s a real dearth of people available and willing to do that work. That’s the challenge—to watch that and feel like whatever we’re doing, we’re just a tiny drop in the ocean of all the work that needs to be done.
How to support Bible translation
PO: How can listeners to this podcast support and help people like yourself, involved in Bible translation?
SB: Yeah. Obviously praying for our work and for more workers to do it. Those are the big things. We always need our own resources and finances, but that’s almost the easy part of the process. You think, God provides what’s needed for the workers to do what we’re doing, but we really need more people to be willing to step up and be a part of this ministry.
So always be on the lookout for people who you think might be suited to working in Bible translation. In that, maybe just be wary of stereotyping the kind of people who you think [Laughter] would make good Bible translators. There’s lots of stereotypes out there that, to some extent, can be grounded in reality [Laughter], but they’re also not always completely helpful. You don’t have to be an absolute languages genius to be a translator. I definitely wouldn’t put myself in that category.
Really, what we want are people who love the Bible, who are interested in communicating it well, who are interested in how other cultures and people think and see the world, who are relational and who are willing to invest time in other communities and get alongside translators in their context and support them.
So tap people on the shoulder if you think that’s something that they should consider, and maybe even tap yourself on the shoulder if you feel like that’s a ministry that you could serve in. I think just keep an open mind about what being a Bible translator looks like, and get to know some real-life translators and find out about their work.
We love having people come to visit us in Darwin. It’s an easy trip up from most places in Australia. If you ever feel like you want to come for a little exposure trip and see what we’re up to and meet some people, then we’re always very happy to arrange that.
Just keep the conversation about Bible translation alive in churches, Bible study groups and among people you know. It’s not always the first mission or ministry area that people think of when you’re praying or encouraging people into mission work. So keep it on everyone’s radars and continue to pray.
Thoughts on our English Bible translations
PO: Particularly as native English speakers, we’re blessed with so many English versions, and there’s something about appropriate about that, because they are read by not just people who are native speakers, but it gives people access to the word of God through the language that is so widely spoken around the world—just as a final question and stepping back a little bit, you work in Bible translation. How does that help you think about the Bible you read as a Christian? Interestingly, right at the beginning of this interview, you talked about the church you grew up in, where you read the King James Version. I’m guessing that probably isn’t the version you read in your quiet time every morning—
SB: I do love and appreciate the King James Version a lot more now than I did as a child [Laughter]. I understand a lot of what’s going on behind the big, fancy words. But you’re right: it’s not a great everyday reading Bible.
PO: Yeah. So do you have thoughts about the English versions that we have? Also, maybe include some helpful things that listeners can think about as they consider what version they should use or what versions we should use in our churches.
SB: Yeah. As translators, we often think in four categories when it comes to thinking about what makes a good Bible translation. We say we want it to be accurate, which means it conveys the same meaning as the original text to the original audience. We want it to be clear so it’s easily understood by the people reading it. We want it to sound natural, like a person who speaks that language would speak. And we want it to be accepted: we want people to like it and be willing to use it.
Now really, the last three of those things—clear, natural, accepted—are very subjective and vary, depending on the individual and the context. It could be a matter of personal preference, to a large extent—especially if you’re just talking about a Bible you want to use personally.
The accuracy criteria is probably the most important one to think about more objectively. Again, there’s a lot of room for debate about what makes an “accurate” translation. As you said, Peter, there are numerous different English translations currently in use, and without having done all the research, I think it would be fair to say that a lot of them are quite accurate in the way that they represent the original languages. But they’ve interpreted those texts in various different ways, or used particularly literary styles to communicate the message of those texts.
A few things that you might want to think about if you’re trying to assess how good a translation is would be to look at things like: was it produced by a panel of translators, or just by one translator, working by themselves? If the latter, then that may be a bit of a red flag, because ideally, you’d have lots of different people and perspectives putting together a translation.
Similarly, did the translation grow out of one denomination or tradition, or is there a broad representation of different Christian denominations on that translation group?
Was the translation based off the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, or is it a translation of another English translation? If the latter, again, it’s a bit of a red flag, because you want to make sure that your source text is the original text of the Bible, and not a second translation of it.
Then you might want to look at how long the translation took to produce. Generally, the longer the better. If someone whipped out a translation of the New Testament in two years, I’d be pretty concerned about its accuracy.
Then just generally, is it being used by other people who you trust—by churches that you trust? All those things together will probably give you an idea of how good a translation is.
But as I say, when it comes to things like the style of language used, or whether you think it sounds “natural” or a little bit stilted, there might be contexts where that’s actually helpful for you to be able to read a Bible in that way. So those things would all be somewhat a matter of personal preference, I think.
PO: That’s very helpful.
Conclusion
PO: Susanna, thank you very much for your time with us today. We really appreciate this conversation, and we really appreciate the very important that you’re doing in Bible translation. We wish you all the best and we will try to remember to pray for you in that. Thank you, Susanna!
SB: Thanks, Peter!
[Music]
PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
[Music]
