‘Like an alley leading to the highway’

Karelia, Russian Federation — What does it mean to a group of people like the Karelians to have the Word of God in their mother tongue? Zinaida Dubinina is a teacher and poet who translated the Children’s Bible into Livvi. The book was published in 1995. “I can still remember how glad I was when I got the booklet The Life of Jesus in my hands,” she says. “It was like a light that flashed in front of me, like an answer to my thoughts, like an alley that leads to the highway.

Inner being

“Although I had read the Bible in Russian and in Finnish before, its words had never touched my inner being the way this word in my mother tongue did. Now I am involved in Bible translation work myself, I understand why the Bible has to be translated into the particular language of each people. It is only in your own language that the whole truth of the Bible can be revealed, the truth that concerns everyone in the world and that everyone needs. It expresses God’s will, the will that made us Karelians and gave us our own land. Life changes, people change, but the eternal word of God does not.”

Reading clubs

Such was the interest in the new translations of the books of the New Testament that reading clubs, gathering in people’s homes, were started in more than 50 Karelian villages. They began by looking at Luke (published in 1997), and went on to Mark and Acts.

The Karelian language of Livvi is written in Latin characters. Not all Karelians can read it but many of those who could not have now been prompted to learn. One woman who is a neighbour of Ms Dubinina and who did not have the chance to study when young, was taught to read it by her grandchildren.

Clarity

In January Sinikka Saari, of the Institute for Bible Translation, and I visited Olonets to test the intelligibility of the texts of St Paul. Working with a group of two women and two men, we asked each in turn to read a paragraph of the text. If the reader stumbled, hesitated or made a mistake, we asked ourselves what had caused it. We tested them on the text they had just read. It was not to test their knowledge of the Bible or their understanding of spiritual matters that we were testing, but the clarity of the translation.

Testing

During the testing we saw which words people could not understand. There are some basic concepts which we have been struggling with for almost ten years: concepts such as ‘prophet’, ‘covenant’, ‘hope’, ‘to witness’, ‘servant’, ‘to put to the test’ and ‘righteousness’.

n Thanks to progress made with the Livvi translation, these girls can now read parts of the New Testament in their own language

We tried substituting a range of different words. The test group understood that now there was a serious task on hand: the phrases used in the New Testament will be there for decades. We all felt that God helped us to find suitable words and expressions. Although St Paul’s texts are profound and difficult, the members of the group were able to follow.

After a particularly knotty point, one of them cried out: “I have read the Bible in different languages and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Karelian Bible will be the best!”