The Greek that is translated as “a sower went out to sow his seed” or similar in English is translated in Chukchi as “the man who makes the bread-grass grow came out to put the seeds of this grass into the soil.” Andrei S. Desnitsky explains (in: The Bible Translator 2018, p. 233ff. ): “This polysynthetic Paleo-Asiatic language is spoken by several thousand people living on the Chukotka peninsula beyond the polar circle, just opposite Alaska. Only reindeer breeding is possible there, no agriculture. Edible plants such as cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus) grow in the wild and are never cultivated, so scenarios related to sowing are completely unfamiliar to speakers of the language.

“What can be done, then, with the famous phrase, ‘A sower went out to sow his seed’ which begins perhaps the best-known parable in the New Testament? The present version says qytğ’i tyŋeč’yllqyll’ynritllevyll’yn jarğety enanretllavynvo tyŋeč’yllqyllti emrenynŋevŋe, which can be roughly rendered as ‘the man who makes the bread-grass grow came out to put the seeds of this grass into the soil.’ This long explication is very far from a natural picture of everyday peasant life such as we find in the original. The meaning will be generally understood by readers whose experience, due to modern media, is no longer limited to the local style of life, but it definitely sounds neither natural nor poetic.

“We discussed this case for a long time with the Chukchi translation team, trying to find a cultural substitute, but in the end we gave up. The only natural way to express the idea would be to invent a completely different story about a reindeer herder who treats his herds in different ways so that some perish and some flourish and multiply, but we hardly could call this story a translation. And, after all, metaphors of sowing and reaping are present everywhere in the New Testament, so eliminating them completely was not an option.”