Happy Birthday Church!  Its Pentecost where we recall the linguistic miracle that occurred to birth the Christian church when the Holy Translator spoke through the apostles in unknown languages and translated so that everyone there heard the wonders of God in their own language!  As we do the “The Esalas on tour” (see our speaking schedule) Pentecost provides a fat fastball right down the middle so that we can easily hit a Bible Translation homerun by talking about how the Holy Translator (Spirit) is still at work using humble people to translate his Word so that the Komba also may hear the wonders of God in their own language (Acts 2.8).I wonder what kind of translation principles the Holy Spirit used.  Dynamic equivalence? Formal equivalence? Literary translation?  Did he mainly translate based on the principle of relevance theory?  We won’t know in this life.

Personally, I like a lot of the ideas put forth by Dr. Ernst Wendland for translation called Literary Functional Equivalence (LiFE).  Here is an partial list of his publications.

What we can say about Pentecost is that the Spirit chose to translate into each language thereby at once relativizing one language’s value over against another and at the same time ensuring each language’s uniqueness.  Given that, it makes it even more enriching to translate because not only is something “lost in translation” but we can even say as concepts are functionally translated that there is gain in translation!  Especially as translators, by his grace, follow the footsteps of the Spirit in translating the wonders of God in their own languages.