Devoted to the Propagation and Defense of New Testament Christianity
VOLUME 22
March 18, 1971
NUMBER 44, PAGE 7

Say It In Swahili

Kenneth Green

Sydney J. Harris in his "Strictly Personal" syndicated column (Louisville Times, Dec. 29, 1970) presented some thoughts which serve to illuminate a big problem in translation.

Swaziland, a new African state which has its own national airline, recently attempted to print tickets in Swazi instead of English. However, they found it impossible to translate such phrases as "unless expressly so provided, nothing herein contained shall waive any limitation of liability of carrier..."

The Swazi tongue just doesn't contain such legalistic terms and phrases.

Mr. Harris doesn't tell us what course the airline took. We can but assume that these alternatives were open: (1) Paraphrase the thoughts into the tribal language, making use of idiomatic expressions that would help get the ideas across. This would probably be impractical due to the space required. (2) Transliterate the English words into Swazi and try to educate the populace as to their meanings, thus making these new words part of their vocabulary.

The latter possibility, though the most feasible, would be difficult. The average citizen of Swaziland has not been trained to think thoughts which require such words for expression. But then, now that there is a need for these modes of expression, this difficulty will be diminished.

Such problems of translation are familiar to the serious student of the Bible. One classic example is the translation of the Hebrew "sheol" and the Greek "hades" These words are synonymous. Sheol was consistently translated hades in the Septuagint, a Greek Version of the Old Testament.

In the King James Version however, we find sheol mistranslated "grave" 31 times, "hell" 31 times, and "pit" 3 times. In the New Testament, hades is mistranslated "hell" 11 times. Two other words are rendered "hell" as well, which doesn't help things.

Lexicographers provide no authority for such translation. They inform us with one voice that sheol and hades denote a place of departed spirits. Why then were these words mistranslated every time? Several factors were possibly involved, but one important one was that there is simply no word in the English language which means what sheol and hades mean in the Hebrew and Greek respectively.

In other words, it is impossible to translate these words into English. The logical alternatives are the same as those which were open to the Swazi airline. The translators of the American Standard Version of 1901 took the most feasible of these when they gave the words English spellings and naturalized them into our language.

Now I should say something to connect this article to its title. Mr. Harris went on to mention some of the very expressive words in the two principle African tongues, and Swahili, for which we have no translations in our "sophisticated" language.

A "Mumagamagama" for example is "one who loses other people's things." But the one word which surely deserves a place in our vocabulary is "Muwavi" which means "a good looking woman who can't cook."

I've a feeling that we could find more use for that one than the Swazis will ever find for "unless expressly so provided.. ."

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