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| The Arabic Bible Translation of Cornelius V.A. Van Dyck |
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Henry Jessup, Fifty Three Years in Syria Vol. I (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1910), chapter 4, Pp. 66-78: The Arabic Bible - It’s Translation and the Translators (1848 - 1865) "And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" Revelation 22:2 Foreign missionaries have moved mountains. Grain by grain, rock by rock, by steady work, year after year, toiling, delving, tunneling, the giant mountain obstacles have been gradually melted away. After years of silent, unseen, prayerful, agonizing work, suddenly a new version of the sacred Scriptures is announced, and millions find the door of knowledge and salvation suddenly opened to them. It is easy to read in a Bible society report that the Bible has been translated into Mandingo for eight millions, into Panjabi for fourteen millions, into Marathi for seventeen millions, into Cantones for twenty millions, into Japanese for fifty millions, into Bengali for thirty-nine millions, into Arabic for fifty millions, into Hindi for eighty-two millions, and into Mandarin Chinese for two hundred millions. But who can comprehend what it all means? To those who claim that missionaries are, or should be, only men who are failures at home, who are unable to fill home pulpits, but are good enough for Asiatic or African mission work, such a statement must be an unsolved and unsolvable riddle. Translation is an art, a science, one of the most difficult of all literary undertakings. To translate an ordinary newspaper editorial from English into French, German or Italian, would cost most scholars many hours of work. It is easier to compose in a foreign tongue than to translate into it, adhering conscientiously to the meaning, yet casting it so perfectly into the native idiom as to conceal the fact of its foreign origin. Few natives of Asia can translate from English into their own tongue without revealing the stiff foreign unoriental source from which the material was taken. Dr. Thomas Laurie in his able work "Missions and Science," p. 245, says, "If any wonder why so much pains should be taken to make a version not only accurate but idiomatic, let him read the following words of Luther in 1530: ‘ In translating, I have striven to give pure and clear German, and it has verily happened that we have sought, a fortnight, three or four weeks, for a single word, and yet it was not always found. In Job we so laboured, Philip Melanchthon, Aurogalius and I, that in four days we sometimes barely finished three lines.’ Again he writes, ‘We must not ask the Latinizes how to speak German, but we must ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes, the common man in the market place and read in their mouths how they speak and translate accordingly.’" >> read complete article |