Topic: The Woman Who Gave the World a Thousand Names for God – Christian News 5 October   2022 – Faithwheel.com

Click HERE for Previous News Post

The Woman Who Gave the World a Thousand Names for God

How a British linguist and a failed Nigerian coup changed everything about Bible translation.

Image: Illustration by Dorothy Leung

In July of 2007, Bible translators from a dozen Nigerian languages came together in the rural town of Bayara, Nigeria, for a three-week workshop to begin translating the Gospel of Luke. They gathered in a steel-roofed school building with a number of outside consultants—some Nigerian, others American and British.

At the end of Friday, July 27, they had wrapped up their first week of work and made plans to unwind. Multilingual collaboration is taxing, and everyone was eager to eat dinner and watch a movie.

The translators gathered their papers, books, and laptops into bags and slung them over their shoulders. One of them grabbed a USB thumb drive attached to a lanyard, which they used to pass files back and forth and store backups of their work.

They walked half a kilometer through the warm evening air to a guest house where they were staying near the local hospital. The cooler rainy season had just begun, but this day had been neither cool nor rainy.

The group finished eating around 7:30, and Veronica Gambo, the wife of one of the translation consultants, made popcorn. She filled a bowl and was carrying it out to join the others in front of the television when men with automatic rifles burst through a door into the kitchen.

Gambo froze. A man put a gun barrel between her shoulder blades and marched her, still bearing the popcorn, into the living room.

“Get down!” Danjuma Gambo, Veronica’s husband, remembers the men yelling. They fired shots into the walls and ceiling. They forced everybody to the ground, including the translation project’s leader, a silver-haired British woman in her late 60s.

Andy Kellogg, an American working as a Bible translation consultant, was lying on the floor and wondering: Would the men rob them and leave quickly, or do something worse?

“If you’re in a remote place, and it doesn’t seem like help will be coming quickly, you can take your time as a robber,” Kellogg said. “And we were in a remote place.”

Fortunately for the translators, the men were not religious terrorists. The brigands had come for the laptops. They took nine in all—and the translation work stored on the computers’ hard drives—along with personal belongings like passports and credit cards.

When the thieves left, the project leader, Katharine Barnwell, rose from the floor and dusted off her clothing. She checked with each translator to make sure they were okay. Then someone spotted something the thieves had overlooked hanging on a nail in the living room: the lanyard with the USB drive. The sole backup of their translation work.

Barnwell spoke in a matter-of-fact, British way: “Right. Well, we’re not going to let this stop us.”

Having worked in Nigeria most of her career as a linguist with the translation organization SIL, Barnwell had tallied her share of brushes with danger. Six times she was robbed at gunpoint. She’d survived multiple rounds of malaria. She had endured the constant threat of Boko Haram and terrorists who bomb churches.

Barnwell wanted to press forward with the project, and after some discussion, every worker decided to stay and continue the workshop. Within a few minutes, Danjuma Gambo said, the group burst into song, praising God and praying for a way to finish God’s work.

There was one difficulty: We have no computers, Kellogg thought. This is going to be really hard on Monday.

But on Monday, when they returned to work, they found that every laptop had been replaced. It was not the result of emails, funding requests, forms, or petitions to Western missions agencies. The computers were gifts from local Nigerian Christians.

News of the robbery had spread quickly, and “there were some influential people in churches nearby who donated,” Kellogg said. Local churches and benefactors wanted the translations to continue. They believed in the work and were driving it.

With the thumb-drive backup, Barnwell’s team quickly restored their work and picked up where they left off. They went on to finish the Gospel of Luke in each of the 12 Nigerian languages, quickly followed by 12 new translations of the Jesus film, whose script comes almost entirely from Luke. Many of those languages now have full New Testaments, according to Kellogg, and some have moved into translations of the Old Testament.

Image: Photos Courtesy of Katharine Barnwell

A “discover your language” workshop in Madagascar, where Barnwell worked with translators to produce the Gospel of Luke in multiple languages, many of which would eventually develop into full New Testaments, 2001

The incident in northeast Nigeria is a freeze-frame from the great missiological shift that has been playing out over the past 50 years: the transfer of ownership from Western individuals and institutions to leaders in the Global South. The idea that Americans and Europeans are no longer in the pilot’s seat of the missions enterprise—and are being rapidly replaced by Christians in the majority world—is no longer new. It is taken almost as a given for how the gospel will spread in the 21st century.

Nigerian ownership is what saved the projects born from Barnwell’s workshop—or at least what helped them quickly back to their feet. And it was perhaps poetic: Barnwell, a Westerner, was one of the earliest champions of empowering Nigerians to take over translation work in their country.

In fact, it’s likely that no living person has had a greater influence on the world of Bible translation than Barnwell, who is now 84. But unless you’ve worked in the industry—I was a Bible translator when I first met Barnwell at a Texas conference a decade ago—you’ve probably never heard of her.

While the world loses a language every 40 days, translation efforts bring new life to threatened tongues.

KATE SHELLNUTT

Katharine Barnwell was born in London in 1938. Her earliest memories take place underground, hiding from Nazi bombing raids. To escape the dangers of war, Barnwell and her siblings were sent away to live with family in the countryside, much in the way The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens.

As a child, and still today, Barnwell loved reading. In 1956, she enrolled in the English language and literature program at the University of St Andrews, one of the few British universities at the time with a large concentration of young women.

“I grew up in a churchgoing family, a very genuine churchgoing family. But it was only later,” Barnwell said, “through the ministry of the Christian Union when I got to university, that I came to understand what it really meant to follow the Lord.”

Around the time she was dabbling in linguistics in one of her courses, analyzing and diagramming the English language, Barnwell attended a meeting with George Cowan, then the president of Wycliffe Bible Translators International, who shared about the need for Bible translators.

“That was it for me,” Barnwell said. She began taking training courses with Wycliffe before she even graduated school.

In 1960, Barnwell began studying with the Summer Institute of Linguistics—known today simply as SIL—and was invited to return the following year to teach.

In her teaching, Barnwell focused on semantics. “It’s really the theory of meaning,” she explained. “When you’re translating, you’re not translating the words, you’re translating the meaning. So how do you translate the meaning, and how do you recognize the categories there are in meaning?”

When doing Bible translation, this distinction between language’s form and language’s meaning is not trivial. It’s at the very foundation of the discipline.

Barnwell’s early studies in semantics shaped the rest of her 60-year career. She spent much of those decades training others on the nuances of semantics and, critically, developing ways for people without a graduate-level education to understand it.

Almost inadvertently, she revolutionized the world of Bible translation.

Image: Photograph by Michael Wharley for Christianity Today.

Barnwell at home in Goring-on-Thames, England, where she uses Zoom to continue work with colleagues in Africa, 2022

Barnwell moved to Nigeria in 1964. Newly independent from Britain and one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, Nigeria was a sort of promised land for translation. It has nearly 700 languages, and at the time, most of them did not have a word of Scripture. Many had never even been written down and lacked an orthography—a writing system fitting their sounds.

SIL sent Barnwell to the Mbembe, a people group scattered across villages in Nigeria’s southeast corner. She started from scratch.

“Happily, the people were very keen on me learning the language,” Barnwell said. She remembers a woman befriending her early on and teaching her new concepts. “The next day, she’d ask me again, and if I couldn’t remember, she’d say, ‘I told you that yesterday!’”

Barnwell said she quickly won the hearts of her Nigerian colleagues—referred to at the time as “language helpers”—and made a home there. (Today, she has spent more of her life in Nigeria than in the UK.) The future looked bright.

But in 1967, Nigeria exploded into civil war. What’s known as the Biafran War would claim well over a million lives through conflict and resulting agricultural catastrophe.

As Western missionaries left the country, Barnwell tried to remain. But the fighting drew so near that she and another single female missionary had to drop everything and escape. They fled first on foot, then up the Cross River via canoe to Cameroon, where authorities let them cross the border without documentation. From there the women flew to England and waited for it to be safe to return.

Barnwell made the most of her time in limbo. Equipped with her fluency in the Mbembe language and her field data, she completed her PhD at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

In 1970, she returned to Nigeria and to her translation work—only to be uprooted again half a decade later when a political event some 400 miles away set the stage for a reordering of the Bible translation landscape.

On February 13, 1976, Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka and a group of his followers attempted a coup d’état in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria. Though the coup was carried out by Nigerians, it inflamed suspicions about outsiders among Nigeria’s military rulers who thwarted the overthrow.

“Politically,” Barnwell said, “some people felt they didn’t want to promote the minority languages. Division between the different language groups or tribes was a sensitive issue. That was the main reason—there were people in authority who didn’t want to see that [promotion] happen.”

Two weeks after the attempted coup, Nigerian immigration officers met with the Western leaders of SIL and ordered them to appear in Lagos on March 18. When they did, they were given two weeks to wrap up their research and transfer it to a Nigerian university. All SIL linguists were to leave the country.

It was a sudden and astonishing setback that threatened to end translation work in what was arguably Africa’s most important field.

Nigerians and expatriate missionaries hatched a plan to save their work. They quickly assembled a delegation of influential Nigerians—politicians, business leaders, even Festus Segun, the Anglican bishop of Lagos—and pled their case with the government in Lagos: Could the work continue if they transferred full ownership and leadership into Nigerian hands? The government granted the request. Thus began the Nigerian Bible Translation Trust (NBTT), today one of the leading Bible translation organizations in Africa.

Image: Photos Courtesy of Katharine Barnwell

Barnwell in Ovonum, a village in Nigeria’s Mbembe area, with Livinus Enyam, who helped her learn the Mbembe language and begin developing an orthography, 1964

With the agreement, the translation leaders averted disaster. But that was the easy ask. They had a second request: If they were to lose dozens of Western scholars, could they keep a mere four expatriate workers? They might need to stay 20 years to fully train and transfer the leadership of the organization.

This, they knew, would be much harder for the government to stomach.

In the 1970s, translation agencies were dogged by rumors that their missionaries were cooperating with the CIA and other US government agencies to undermine local regimes. Translators in Latin America had come under particular scrutiny; some projects were shut down. The rumors followed them to Nigeria.

The Daily Times of Nigeria reported on May 6, 1976, that “the government felt concerned with the activities of the institute.” The Times tied the closing of SIL to the closing of something else: the “US radio monitoring base at Kaduna,” a facility widely known to be a US intelligence gathering operation.

I asked Danjuma Gambo about these allegations, which were never substantiated. “They were just using that as an excuse,” he said. The development of dictionaries, primary schools, and Bibles is a disruptive force, and for millennia, mother-tongue Scripture has irritated the powerful.

“They knew that the work they were doing—the liberation, the development of the local languages—was making people more aware of their rights,” he said.

Nigerian authorities granted the request to retain some foreigners, but only in part.

Three expats were given temporary visas, but only for a year or two. As the NBTT grew and took on exclusively Nigerian translators, only one expat would be allowed to remain long term.

Guess who they chose.

As the NBTT’s new chief trainer and Western linguist, Barnwell made her home in Jos, a temperate, mid-sized city in central Nigeria where the translation organization was headquartered.

But she had begun preparing for the role years earlier.

In the mid 1970s, Nigeria was the 11th most populous country in the world and growing rapidly (today, it ranks sixth). And in the postcolonial era, the African church was exploding. “Between 1964 and 1984 Christian numbers [in Africa] increased from about 60 million to roughly 240 million,” wrote Lamin Sanneh, the late Yale missiologist of Gambian descent. “The irruption of Christianity in contemporary Africa is without parallel in the history of the church.”

In Nigeria—particularly in the southern half, where the British had established numerous universities—many new believers were well educated, quadrilingual and pentalingual. If Nigeria needed scores of translators to bring the gospel to its hundreds of language groups, it wasn’t hard for Barnwell and some of her contemporaries to imagine where the workforce ought to come from.

For instance, John Bendor-Samuel, a founder of the UK arm of Wycliffe and a mentor of Barnwell’s, had in the early 1960s forged partnerships with universities in Ghana and Nigeria to do translation work, the first such arrangements on the continent.

Image: Photos Courtesy of Katharine Barnwell

Barnwell showing a booklet written in Mbembe to speakers reading their language for the first time, 1965

In the early 1970s, Barnwell wanted to go further: She wanted to employ Nigerians who were not university-trained linguists, even if it meant teaching them herself.

Unfortunately, there were no tools on the market for that sort of thing. They hadn’t been invented yet.

According to Ernst Wendland, professor of ancient studies at the University of Stellenbosch and one of the world’s leading Bible translation scholars, none of the contemporary published training materials were any good—not for nonlinguists. So Barnwell, several years before taking on her training role with the NBTT, had begun writing her own training curriculum and teaching her first Nigerian translators.

Barnwell leaned on the linguistic theory of influential thinkers like Eugene Nida, Charles Taber, John Beekman, and John Callow. But while they published almost exclusively for the academically fluent, Barnwell translated lofty ideas for people who had never studied linguistics.

For instance, where Nida proposed the hugely influential theory of “dynamic equivalence,” Barnwell coined the term “meaning-based translation”—a simpler and less intimidating door to the same concept.

The training was a clear success. As more and more translation leaders began exploring the idea of training nationals, Barnwell was asked to turn her course into a book. In 1975, she published Bible Translation: An Introductory Course in Translation Principles.

Not everyone in the translation world was smitten with the idea of equipping first-language workers to lead projects. William Cameron Townsend, who founded both Wycliffe and SIL, rejected the notion of having “tribesmen” take charge of translation efforts, believing that Westerners had an obligation to lead the work and not “pass the buck [and] let the nationals do it.”

But in Nigeria, the government was forcing Western hands. And no one was as well positioned as Barnwell was in 1976, when Nigeria purged itself of lettered Western linguists, for the monumental training task that lay ahead of her.

Female missionaries have propelled the movement to bring Scripture to every tribe and tongue.

KATE SHELLNUTT

Nearly half a century and four editions later, Barnwell’s book is still the gold-standard manual for training first-language translators (formerly called mother-tongue translators) the world over. I used it in my trainings overseas when I worked as a translation consultant. So has every Bible translation worker I interviewed for this article. (Danjuma Gambo was teaching from Barnwell’s text in Nigeria when he stepped away to speak with me via Zoom.).

Other organizations eventually developed competing materials, according to Wendland, “but none to my knowledge have really succeeded in replacing or in doing something better” than Barnwell’s.

Today, the textbook itself has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It’s given away digitally to pretty much every translator associated with mainstream Bible translation organizations.

“In the old days, you’d have a translation workshop where you’d have someone teaching on semantics, someone on lexicology, some on syntax, some on discourse, and then you’d expect the translators to go out and apply that themselves in their actual work,” Wendland said. But when they opened the Scriptures to begin, they were at a loss. “That’s not the best way to teach translators.”

Instead, Barnwell taught translators to learn by doing. If the old model was deductive, hers was inductive. Barnwell invited first-language speakers to wade into the Bible like swimmers and paddle, becoming skilled in semantics and discourse and other fancy disciplines along the way—without necessarily knowing the names of those fields. In a sense, she discipled her students.

It might seem obvious in light of today’s learning theories, when we just seem to know that you wouldn’t teach swimming on a chalkboard. But at the time, Barnwell’s training was revolutionary, and it multiplied in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

In 1978, Barnwell published the second edition of her book, and shortly after, she began a meteoric rise in the translation world. By 1980 she was overseeing all of SIL’s projects in Africa and spent a dizzying decade crisscrossing the continent, teaching in the UK, and completing the Mbembe New Testament that had been her career’s first love.

Around 1984, Barnwell remembers, is when her book and methods began to see widespread use outside of Africa. As translators trained on her book went on to become consultants and trainers themselves, they spent careers doing the work and raising up new students, who did the same.

Larry Jones, CEO of the translation organization Seed Company, estimated that in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the translators trained on Barnwell’s materials number in the thousands.

To glimpse the full impact of Barnwell’s methods, you have to look not only at her books, but at film. The Jesus film.

For the first 20 years of its existence, the Jesus Film Project, the ministry that distributes the 1979 movie depicting the life of Christ, did not do its own translation work. Instead, it “relied on the people who worked on a translation to work on the script for us,” said Tom Meiner, the project’s chief operating officer.

When the Jesus film staff wanted to expand into a new language, they would reach out to translation agencies and ask, “Do you have anybody? Are you working on this language? Do you have somebody who could work on the script?” Meiner said.

If they heard back at all, they were normally pointed in the direction of a Western missionary. Often, Meiner said, that missionary had since retired or moved on to another project. Or they were dead.

Chris Deckert, the film’s director of language strategies, said that if they found a willing translator, they would send “an Excel spreadsheet with a little manual that said, ‘Hey, missionary, if you could translate these lines here into these lines here, and try to keep the syllable count as close as possible because this is lip-synched…’”

Also Read: Open Heaven 5 October  2022 – Topic: EXPOSING DEMONIC OPERATIONS IV 

The process was cumbersome. “We’d send off that packet, and maybe a year, two, or three, sometimes they’d get back to us,” Deckert said. The work that did come back could be unpredictable and low quality.

The group wanted to “move forward on languages that had no Scripture and no Jesus film,” Meiner said. “The largest ones that we could get going.” But that would mean doing original translation work, something they were not equipped to do.

In the late 1990s, Paul Eshleman, the Jesus film’s first executive director, met with leaders from Wycliffe and SIL. He cast the vision for a partnership to create a version of the film for each of the 30 largest remaining languages that did not yet have a word of Scripture. The translation agencies would do what they do best, and so would the Jesus film crew. Eshleman offered to fund the 30 projects, to get them moving quickly.

It was ambitious and experimental, and the big agencies were reluctant to get tangled up in it.

“At that time, no one was willing to let this be in their house. There was no home for this effort,” said Seed Company’s Jones, who was also a former vice president at SIL. “Wycliffe wasn’t sure they were ready to do it. SIL was sure they weren’t ready to do it.”

The leaders suggested a young translation organization that might be a better fit, Meiner remembered. It was called Seed Company.

Back then, Seed Company was a startup, birthed in a converted broom closet. “The skunk works of the Bible translation world,” according to Deckert.

Founded in 1993 by a former Wycliffe president, Seed Company was hungry to prove itself. Its focus was on passing the translation baton to the global church and channeling funding to employ national translators instead of Westerners. It jumped on the Jesus film opportunity.

ALSO READ: CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW US ON TWITTER ⊗ OPEN HEAVEN ⊗ JOEL OSTEEN DEVOTIONAL⊗ ABOVE ONLY ⊗ OUR DAILY BREAD ⊗ SEEDS OF DESTINY ⊗ JOYCE MEYER DEVOTIONAL ⊗ RHAPSODY OF REALITIES ⊗ JOHN HAGEE ⊗ MFM DAILY DEVOTIONAL ⊗ DCLM DAILY MANNA ⊗ JOHN PIPER DEVOTIONAL ⊗ UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST