The Impact of the KJV in Caribbean Bible Translation Work: An Exploratory Introduction
The KJV has impacted the English-speaking world linguistically, culturally, and literarily. In the area of Bible translation, specifically in Creole languages in the Caribbean basin, the phenomenon arises where historical translations like the KJV become pseudo-originals, functioning as the standard for subsequent translation work in any vernacular, even non-English based Creoles. While the actual history of the KJV translation strongly supports autochthonous language and subsequent theological emancipation, the historical reality is that it has been used incorrectly to disavow such efforts, including the acceptance of other valid translation types.
Bible Translation as Incarnation of the Word of God: Transformational Power through Form and Meaning
Bible translation is not a neutral activity, divested of any moral, spiritual, or cultural claim or responsibility. Form has often distorted meaning but happily meaning has often created new hybrid forms in different cultures. This paper addresses the need to work out the incarnational aspect of Bible translation in terms of a conscious multimodal perspective. First, there is a need for a philosophical-theological account of the dialectical relationship between form and meaning. Second, we need to reinterpret the relationship among different types of embodied performance, such as oral and written translation, as part of the same multimodal reality. Finally, Bible translation should promote the appropriation of Scripture through the community’s culture in different forms in order to unleash its transformational power. Multimodal theory can offer a valuable tool to treat all types and modes of translation as equal, but distinct, expressions, thus acknowledging different cultures, people groups, and communities of faith.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.