Beyond Words – Foreign Materials

One day, about three years ago, I was sitting on the side of the room overhearing a discussion among our review committee quickly heating up into an argument – translation of something that was totally foreign in Gmz culture. As is often the case with such terms, there is not a simple well-accepted Gmz word just sitting on our table for easy use. And, often times, it isn't a matter of searching harder and digging deeper to find that perfect word buried deep in their lexicon. At some point in our research, we need to accept that the perfect, ready-made translation simply doesn't exist. And so, as translators, we are forced to think beyond the words themselves, often following one of three ways to solve the problem:

1) We could choose a Gmz word that is close and hope that the context of Scripture expands the meaning of that word (such as what we did with our word for holy)

2) We could use a descriptive phrase in place of the word (such as what we did with Gentile – “people not of Jewish origin”)

3) We could borrow a word from another language (such as we did to avoid controversy in the word for baptism). (this option is by far the least desirable as described below)

Hearing that the conversation among the review committee was hitting a stalemate, I stood up, reached into my motorcycle jacket pocket and pulled out a tire gauge.

I showed it to the review committee and, after telling them what it was and what it was used for, I asked them what it was called in the Gmz language. Of course, I got nothing but blank stares and “Who knows?” expressions. I went on to remind them of the three options we have in communicating something totally foreign to our Gmz audience. How would those three play out in the tire gauge example?

Option #1: Choose a Gmz word that is close: maybe "stick", or "metal". That clearly was not going to get us far since a tire gauge is very far removed from their culture.

Option #2: Descriptive Phrase: "thing used for measuring air in the feet of a vehicle" or shorter, "air measurer."

Option #3: Borrow a term (modified to sound like Gmz): Taaira gezha – the problem with this option, is that it communicates absolutely nothing to a Gmz speaker, totally empty of meaning, we might as well call it a "rubber ducky", for that would be no less correct to them.

With something as foreign as a tire gauge, it was clear that option #2 was the best way forward, and most often we have found that to be the case with foreign object/ideas we have encountered in Scripture.

All that to say, in the 71% of the New Testament that we covered before arriving at John's Revelation, we encountered many, many foreign things and took pride in becoming quite good at skirting around them with descriptive phrases (only rarely resorting to the final option of borrowing terms from Amharic). In Revelation, however, we were challenged at a new level as we felt attacked not by a lone hungry hyena every now and then, but rather by a whole pack of hyenas all at once, of course, laughing at our feeble attempts at descriptive phrases. One category of particularly troublesome pests was the diverse materials used by John to describe his heavenly vision.  

METALS: We have a Gmz word for gold, so there is no problem there, silver we had encountered in previous NT books, where, after struggling for some time before we settled on borrowing the Amharic word birr (which unfortunately has the same name as today's local currency - Ethiopian's of old must have traded in silver….interesting).  Now in Revelation, we find not only gold and silver, but also bronze and iron. For iron, we opted to use the Gmz phrase for "strong metal", and bronze was translated as "red metal". Neither are ideal, but at least we avoided borrowing two more meaningless terms from Amharic.

ROCKS: If metals were a partial victory, rocks was a devastating loss. We stumbled through the throne room description of chapter four in which we encountered jasper, carnelian, emerald and crystal, none of which were known to the Gmz people. Beginning with jasper, we hoped to be able to describe it at least by color or shape, and so we turned to our translation notes for help and here is what we found: "There is no complete certainty about all the stones that appear in Revelation. The semiprecious jasper may be yellow, brown, red, or green; it is actually somewhat dull and opaque. Some commentators suggest that the writer had in mind an opal; others, a diamond. The same holds true for the carnelian…" Argh…so much for a descriptive phrase! We did a quick Google images search (which we often do with unknown objects), and up came such a variety, it was clear that we had no chance in translating this rock with anything other than a meaningless borrowed name Yaasp'ed. Not wanting to admit total defeat we included the phrase "expensive polished rock" prior to our cop-out borrowing "which is called jasper" and likewise for the others of chapter 4. However, in chapter 18, we found our one lone victory in the realm of rocks – marble. The Gmz DO have a word for marble because it is mined out of our region, loaded on trucks and taken who knows where. It almost felt too easy just to stick in one word and move on, but we welcomed the breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. If chapter 4 was a minor defeat, chapter 21, and the description of the New Jerusalem was the knockout punch as the city walls were made of our old friend jasper, the twelve foundations of the city wall were decorated with 12 different rocks, none of which we stood a chance at translating into anything meaningful to our Gmz audience. Jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl…the list of painful defeat seemed unending.

Scattered throughout the book of Revelation, and especially that difficult list in 18:12-13, we got nailed with many other foreign materials and other objects, some of which we were able to describe, at least in part. Here is a sample list:

pearls – "beautiful beads called pearl"

ivory - "elephants' teeth"

citron wood - "good-smelling wood"

linen – "beautiful thin cloth/clothes"

silk - "beautiful cloth/clothes made of something called silk"

cinnamon - "bark of a tree that smells nice"

frankincense - “good smelling thing called frankincense”

carriages – “vehicles pulled by horses”

bear – "wild animal called a bear"

sulfur – "stinky thing which is called sulfur"

winepress – "place of squeezing juice of grapes"