I’m having to go back through the Songhai NT text that I checked last month to find something, so it reminded me of some interesting translation issues I had to work through with the team. One had to do with what word to use for “sea.” Revelation 4:6 speaks of a “sea of glass.” The Greek word clearly means “sea” or “lake.” But the Songhai live in the Sahara desert (or just below it), so they are not familiar with large bodies of water. They have only rivers and small streams. So, they used the words isa honno that means “salty river” (literally, “bitter river”) in places where “sea” occurs in the NT. The missionary coordinator thought they couldn’t do any better, since they don’t have seas in their area. But I kept exploring the issue and found out that Mali does have one large lake, and they use the words isa berdi which means “large river.” This is a better solution than “salty river,” since the Sea of Galilee is a fresh water lake. I realize a sea/lake is not a river, since the latter is distinguished by the fact that the water flows from a source to a destination. But when you think about seas and lakes, the water does actually flow in them as well. In fact, they can also have a source from which water flows into them, and they can have an outlet. So, maybe “large river” isn’t as bad as we might have originally thought!
Another issue we had was in relation to their words for “crown.” We came across stephanos in various places in the NT, and they were translating them with their word for “hat”, since only kings wear crowns. Clearly, in the places where we saw stephanos, the idea in the context was not one of a king reigning over a kingdom. So, they used the word for “hat” and then just added the other expressions that the Greek has, like “glory” or “golden” or “life.” But as we explored the issue further, they noted that a new village chief to mark his entrance into the new position. So, we decided we could use their word for “crown” after all. (BTW, their word for “reign” has the idea of “eating a village.” This is because the chief often gets gifts of food from the villagers, who are either thanking him for services rendered or bribing him to get services rendered. I saw this in languages in Chad as well. Very interesting!)
Because the Songhai live in the desert, we had yet another problem to wrestle with–how to translate “mountains.” Their normal procedure is to translate it with the word for “rock” and then to add “big” to it. But they ran into a problem in Revelation 6:16, which has both “mountains” and “rocks.” The translators didn’t want to sound redundant, so they just left out one of the words. But we don’t want to leave out anything in the Greek, so we changed it to a translation that means “the big rocks and the rocks.” It may not seem to be the best solution to us, but there really are no other options (creating new words for such contexts really isn’t good to do, since the meaning is basically already there in the Songhai).
An amusing sidelight is that their word for “day” (jirbi) means something like “the light after sleeping,” indicating that the day begins for them after they wake up from a night’s sleep!
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