Over thirty years ago, Hessel and Coby Visser left for Botswana. Their mission was: to translate the Bible into Naro. To do that, you need to have a good command of a language. On 28 June, Hessel will receive his doctorate in Apeldoorn. Then he will show that translation is sometimes like doing a puzzle.
They went ...
For his thesis, he described the puzzles to be solved when translating personal pronouns from Greek to Naro. We, you, they - it seems so simple. A sentence like: 'They went (...) by ship to Cyprus', (Acts 13:4) is simple: you transfer the personal pronoun third person plural from Greek to Naro. But, then you have to choose the right Naro word. There, it matters whether that 'they' is about two men or several men or whether it includes women. In the case of Acts 13, this is not so difficult: it is clearly about Paul and Barnabas. Although: there must not have been two of them in that boat ...
Major consequences
With the personal pronouns 'we' and 'you', there are also those puzzles to be solved. There, too, you have quite a bit of choice. Are those 'we' two men or are there more? Are there women among them? The choice of the word you translate Greek with sometimes has very big consequences. Consider the Saviour's word in Luke 22:19: 'This is my body which is given for you.' So if you use the form there in the translation of the word 'you' that points to a group of men gathered there at that moment, you exclude the reader of 2022 from the Lord's gift. The insights Hessel gained from his research into the translation of the personal pronoun also help us in the Netherlands to understand the text better.
