Orality and Scripture Internalization: Broadening Involvement in Bible Translation

Well-informed heart-language translators provide the most faithful, trustworthy, understandable, and appropriate Scripture translations. A key task and challenge for these translators is to internalize Scripture well enough to express the meaning of Scripture faithfully and naturally in their language. This is true for every translation method, including oral Bible translation, church-based translation, and oral drafting of written translation.

Many heart-language translators come from predominantly oral cultures. This article will explore the realities and challenges of providing exegetical resources to translators from cultures with a high reliance upon oral communication. Oral cognition and communication are characterized by embodied epistemology, communal semiotics, and narrative rationality. This article will propose an embodied approach to internalization, currently being developed as Church Based Bible Translation Exegetical Resources (CBBT-ER). In this process of internalization, an interpretive community engages each pericope of Scripture to internalize both the pericope’s discourse as well as its canonical, cultural, and theological context.

This discussion will then be grounded in preliminary findings from the testing of the CBBT-ER resources, which will utilize qualitative research methods to analyze the impact of the approach on the quality of the translations produced. From our preliminary testing results, we will examine the challenges, weaknesses, and strengths of using an embodied approach to internalization and propose a way forward for internalization in Bible translation.