Mother Tongue

Ever heard of a MTBTO?

I hadn’t either until I had a chance to visit two of them last week at the end of my visit to central Africa. It stands for Mother Tongue Bible Translation Organization. These organizations are revolutionizing how God’s Word is made accessible to people who have never read the Bible before in their own language.

ACATBA translation team in Bangui, CAR

Commissioned by Wycliffe Associates to check out to the best way to help MTBTOs develop organizationally, I had the privilege of spending some quality time with two exceptional local leaders and their respective national organizations. ACATBA in the Central African Republic (CAR) and ACOTBA-SUBO in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are separated by only 150 miles, but each organization is responsible for the primary oversight of key translation projects in their countries.

Having hung around mission circles for a long time, I thought I had a good handle on what Bible translation is all about. After the past few days, nothing could be farther from the truth! I have been amazed at how much I learned through my interviews with these men and their dedicated staff. Here are just a few highlights:

• ·         Gone, pretty much, are the days of highly-trained, Western-born, linguistic specialists who come to the African jungle to dedicate at least ten years to learning a local language and then another ten or twenty years to producing a copy of the New or Old Testament. That job has now been replaced by a team of three or four “mother-tongue” national workers who already speak the language and, with only couple years (or even months) of basic orientation, are generating first-draft translations in a third or fourth of the traditional time.
• ·         MTBTOs are effectively managing multiple translation teams at once, each focused on a particular tribal language. The only thing keeping them from deploying more teams is the lack of adequate funds to support them.
• ·         Far from being linguistic lightweights, project team leaders are capably parsing out original Greek texts while their companions do word-comparison studies in English, French, Lingala, Sango, or other existing Bible translations used by local populations.
• ·         Most often, teams are working at a common facility where they have ready access to electricity and V-Sat e-mail communications for their laptops. In the case of ACATBA, it’s in Bangui, capital of CAR. For ACOTBA-SUBO, it’s in Gemena, DRC, a major regional capital.
• ·         Teams regularly deploy on multi-week motorcycle safaris to check their translation work against the vernacular of local people throughout their target region. These visits take them to some of the most remote villages in all of Africa.
• ·         Far from being out of the loop, Western translation experts consult with each team to provide essential theological and linguistic accuracy for final drafts. At times, this interaction occurs during a two-week on-site workshop, but more and more it is happening via e-mail links that connect folks in real time across the globe. 

Main base for "mother tongue" translators in Gemena, DRC

As if this isn’t impressive enough, I also learned that these MTBTOs are thinking more and more about the need for sociolinguistic evaluation and research teams to determine how the changing dynamics of a particular tribal people might affect a translation project. Wycliffe/SIL veterans may have determined various translation projects as priorities ten or twenty years ago, but these projects have hardly remained static. Intermarriage, economic upheaval, and even rebel activity have totally changed, in some cases,  the dynamics of the languages people are currently using in a given area. ACATBA’s director, Bertin, explained, “We don’t want to plug away on a language project, only to find we have completed a New Testament for a language people really don’t use anymore.” ACOTBA-SUBO’s leader, Bolobo, alternatively suggested that smart, aggressive efforts of biblical exposure and literacy training with a local population can actually help preserve a mother tongue.

All of this has added a completely new dimension to the value of helping to bolster the organizational capacity of these worthy, national Bible-translation entities. After hours spent with each leader discussing (in French) everything from board governance and job performance review methods to efficient facilities management, I am returning home with a long list of potential ways friends and volunteers from America could come alongside these partners to make them even more effective and accelerate their strategic role of bringing God’s Word to the people of their countries.

Anyone interested in learning more?