The Toba translation team working on the New
Testament [photo: Jo Hill 2006 WR412/6 ARG07DJ-256]
Naturally, some of the problems the Toba translation team have encountered arise from the lack of correspondence between the vocabulary of the original language – Greek in the case of the New Testament – and that of the Toba language or the inadequacy of the vocabulary in the receiving language to render a metaphor in the original text. “For example, in Ephesians Paul talks about the ‘armour of God’,” says David Leake. “ No-one here has ever seen a Roman soldier with all his armour on, so you have to find ways round expressions and terminology. Equally, we don’t have snow here!”
Last Supper
Dr Browne offers another example. “At the Last Supper in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus talks about his body and blood as the bread and wine. If you say, ‘This is my body,’ in Toba, people would understand it literally; Toba is not a language that uses a lot of figurative speech. “So we had to decide whether Jesus was saying ‘This is my body,’ which might cause some people with no Christian background to think ‘What is he doing? What are the people eating?’ Or we had to make it explicit in the text that this bread symbolised his body that was going to be broken. “Obviously, the Catholic Church would not want the text to say explicitly that this bread represented his body because Catholics have a different understanding, but because there is no Catholic Church in the Toba communities we took the liberty of explaining it in the text, saying that this represents my body. Because when you analyse the Passover meal, everything they did and ate had symbolic meaning. So the natural way to interpret Jesus when he says of the bread, ‘This is my body’ would be symbolically. And the translators and I agreed that we could put that explicitly in the text.” There were problems, too, with chapter five of the Book of Ephesians which talks about wives ‘respecting’ their husbands. “The translator had used a word that just meant ‘help’ which I didn’t feel was precise enough,” says Dr Browne. “So I suggested a word which I’d understood as meaning ‘praise or respect.’ But the Tobas came back to me and said that the words I’d suggested ought to be a positive thing – in their language it’s something negative. The word in Toba is ‘niyogodenagac’ which means ‘pride’. So Michael’s suggestion was that the wife should be proud of her husband,” explains David. “But the Tobas thought the word had negative connotations. Maybe they thought it sounded like boasting.” “The Greek word is the word that in the Old Testament is closer to ‘fear’ God, so it’s not about being afraid of him, but fear in terms of reverence,” says Michael.
Close or absent
“Toba is also a language in which spatial relationships are very important,” he says. “So when you talk about somebody, you have to be able to say in Toba whether the person is sitting or standing or close by or going away or absent or dead. The words for talking about somebody also give information about his/her position. So as you go through the text you have to know these things and the consequences of them. The one thing we had quite a discussion about was when the Bible talks about Jesus being dead. Should we use the word in Toba that refers to a person who is dead? In the end we used a word that denotes a person in authority.”