Persona:Moses

Mother tongue translator turned consultant

Background

Role: Old Testament translation consultant

Location: Cameroon

Organization: Cameroonian Association for Bible Translation and Literacy (CABTAL)

Experience: Moses has 12 years of experience translating the Old Testament, as well as 4 years' experience as a translation consultant.

Education: He has a B.A. in Linguistics from a Cameroonian university and a B.A. in Hebrew from a South African university. He also has an M.A. in Theology from a South African seminary, earned over the course of several years while translating.

English level: advanced. Although he speaks a local language at home, he resides in a country where English is an official language and has attended school in English all his life.

Level of Hebrew: Moses has completed enough formal and informal Hebrew study to read the text in the original language, but he still uses glosses and English helps.

Goals

Moses’s ultimate goal is to help people integrate the Scriptures into all of life. He believes that translating the Psalms into African languages will help people learn to talk to God and to engage with him in meaningful ways.

He values local art forms. When he was working as a mother tongue translator, he and his team specifically checked the most popular Psalms, like Psalm 23, to make sure that their translation would be singable. Now that he is a consultant, he asks the teams he works with to collect and study local songs that express themes like joy, suffering, war, and love. This informs and guides word choice and style as they translate Hebrew poetry.

Workflow

Interpretive process: To understand a text, he looks at it in several versions: Hebrew, with glosses and aids; several English translations; and an additional Cameroonian language that he knows. He uses a range of translation resources, including both SIL and UBS translation aids.

He really wants to understand the cultural background of the Bible, and has found illustrated resources about the Biblical world very helpful. These include depictions of the Jewish temple, farming practices, and animals that are mentioned in the Bible. Often, he thinks he sees links between his own culture and ancient Hebrew culture, but he checks carefully to see whether these are true connections.

To deal with emotions in the text, he puts himself in the shoes of the person composing the Psalm, and the emotion comes up naturally. In his community, people often spontaneously compose songs to express their emotions, which prepared him well to understand emotions in Biblical poetry.

Context for Product Use: He uses resources both for initial exegesis and for checking back translations of the Psalms for other language communities. He looks at resources when he is not sure if the translation is consistent enough with the Hebrew text. He also trains local teams to use translation resources like Translator’s Notes in Logos.

Concerns and Challenges

One of his challenges is maintaining consistency in the use of key terms, so he would like a resource that highlights key terms. For example, some Psalms are quoted in the New Testament, so he has to make sure that key terms in the translations match, whether that means updating the New Testament translation or changing the way they’ve translated the Psalm.

It can be a challenge when ancient Hebrew culture is different from his culture. For example, his community doesn’t use oxen for threshing, so he was initially confused about Paul’s instruction not to muzzle oxen when threshing. Resources on Hebrew culture help him overcome these obstacles.