Translating Jita Jonah (part 2)

Jita translators: Magoma and Magesa and Translation Advisor: Ben

This is step 2 in translating the book of Jonah into the Jita language...

TRANSLATION ADVISOR CHECKING

After the Jita translators adapt the text of Jonah from Swahili to Jita, I study the text and refer to my resources to make sure that the meaning of the Jita is consistent with the meaning of the original Hebrew. In my role as Translation Advisor I work with the translation team to make sure that the meaning of God's Word is communicated clearly, accurately, and naturally in Jita.

Here's a sample of the things we discussed...

In Jonah 1:3, the first draft sounded like the sailors were helping Jonah run away from God.  “Jonah paid his fare and got on the boat together with the sailors and they began their safari to go to Tarshish so that Jonah could run from God.”  We changed it to say, “Jonah paid his fare and got on the boat together with the sailors to go with them to Tarshish so that he could run from God.”

In Jonah 1:4, "the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea." The word "hurled" is repeated again in verse 5 when the sailors hurled the extra cargo into the sea. In verse 12 Jonah tells the sailors to hurl him into the sea and then in verse 15 the sailors actually hurled him into the sea. The first draft of Jita Jonah 1:4 sounded like "God brought very much wind." Not very colorful or vivid. I thought it would be cool to use the same word in every occurrence for emphasis. However, when I suggested this to the team, they said for God to hurl a storm onto the sea would make God sound like a malicious killer. Oops! Instead, we settled on a phrase like, "the LORD released an extremely fierce wind on the sea."

In Jonah 1:11, the sailors ask Jonah, "What should we do to you so that the sea will be calm?" In the first draft, the Jita did not include the little phrase "to you." Just two little letters were missing in Jita: [chikore] but it should have been [chikukore].

In chapter 2 we worked very hard to preserve the beautiful Hebrew parallelism.
Jonah 2:2,
{first draft}
"In my distress I prayed to the LORD,
and you answered me by helping me.
I cried to you, that you would help me,
and you saved me from Sheol."

{revision}
"In my distress I cried to the LORD,
and he answered me.
In Sheol I prayed to you LORD,
and you heard my prayer."

In Jonah 4:9, God asks Jonah if Jonah has a right to be angry about the plant. The first draft of the Jita said "I do well to be angry because I want to die." However, Jonah is not giving the reason for his anger, rather he is describing the intensity of his anger. Therefore, we changed it to say, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”

And the list goes on, we spent a couple weeks pouring over every paragraph and every verse and every word and every letter. And we weren't only looking for theological/exegetical issues. We also found information that had been added unnecessarily, or removed accidentally. We found spelling errors and punctuation mistakes. We thought about the flow of the narrative as discourse. We looked at the tenses of verbs and the classes of nouns. Everyday we prayed that God would lead us and guide us to love his Word and communicate the meaning accurately, clearly and naturally.

In the end, we thought we produced a good draft of the book of Jonah....but then came the next step...

Stay tuned......