The Greek that is translated in English as “worthy” does not have an immediate equivalent in Enga. Adam Boyd (on his blog) explains how this was solved in two cases:
“Enga does not have a word that is equivalent to the word ‘worthy,’ we translate the concept by focusing on the goodness or badness of the person in comparison to the action or circumstance under consideration. For example, we translated Luke 15:19 as follows: ‘I am not a good man, so do not call me your son.’ This emphasizes that the goodness of the prodigal son is not commensurate with being called his father’s son. Similarly, in Luke 7:6, the centurion sends a message to Jesus, saying, ‘Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.’ In Enga, we have translated this as, ‘Big Man, I am an unimportant person with no reputation, so do not come to my house.’ Again, the centurion does not consider his personal value to be commensurate with the idea of a person like Jesus entering his house.”
The Greek that is translated as “ponder” in English is translated as “continually think-about” in Tboli, “turn around in the mind” in Batak Toba, “puzzle forth, puzzle back” in Sranan Tongo (source: Reiling / Swellengrebel), “constantly setting down her visions” in Mairasi (source: Enggavoter 2004), “carried all those words in her heart and then sat thinking” in Enga (source: Adam Boyd on his blog ), or “moved them in her heart” (bewegte sie in ihrem Herzen) (German Luther translation).
In Low German idiomatically as “let it pass through her heart again and again” (translation by Johannes Jessen, publ. 1933, republ. 2006).
The Greek and Hebrew term that is translated into English as “yoke,” the Afar translation uses koyta (poles of camel pack) which refers to two poles in front of the hump and two behind; elsewhere in agricultural Ethiopia the yoke is only in front of the hump.
In Chol it is translated with tajbal, a term for “headband” (for carrying) (source: Ronald D. Olson in Notes on Translation January, 1968, p. 15ff.). Likewise, in Kele, it is translated with njɛmbɛ, “a carrying strap worn around the head and across the chest or shoulders to support a burden of firewood, garden produce or even a child carried by this on the back or hip” (source: William Ford in The Bible Translator 1957, p. 203ff. ).
In Matumbi it is translated as “rope” and “yoke is easy” is translated as “rope is slack/soft.” (Source: Pioneer Bible Translators, project-specific notes in Paratext)
In Kwasio it is translated with a term that refers to a “bulky piece of wood attached to the neck of a goat, preventing it from roaming freely in the brushy undergrowth.”
Joshua Ham explains: “When checking this verse in Kwasio, I was surprised to find that the Kwasio had a word for yoke. You see, none of the language groups we have worked with have a tradition of using animals to pull carts or plows. Since yokes don’t exist in the culture, there’s no need for a word for that concept in these languages.
“When I asked the Kwasio team about their word for yoke, they said that they don’t use yokes to help animals pull plows; rather, their word for yoke refers to a bulky piece of wood attached to the neck of a goat, preventing it from roaming freely in the brushy undergrowth. So while the exact use of a Kwasio yoke is not the same as a biblical yoke, there are a lot of similarities: in both cases, it’s a piece of wood around an animal’s neck that serves to keep the animal under control. While the overlap isn’t perfect, it’s pretty good — and almost certainly better than trying to squeeze in a distracting explanation of how yokes function in the biblical cultures.”
Adam Boyd (in The PNG Experience ) tells this story about finding the right term in Enga: “Jesus’s words in Matthew 11:29-30 are some of the most difficult to translate into the Enga language. From the time that I became a Christian, I was taught that a yoke is a wooden crosspiece that is fastened over the neck of two animals and attached to a plough or cart that they are to pull. This is an easy enough concept to understand for people who come from societies that make use of beasts of burden, but in Papua New Guinea, there are no beasts of burden. Consequently the concept of a yoke placed on animals is completely foreign. Thus, we have struggled greatly in our attempt to translate Matthew 11:29-30.
“Recently, however, I came to learn that a yoke can also refer to a wooden frame that a person places on his neck or shoulders to make it easier to carry a heavy load. Indeed, the Bible often makes figurative use of the word ‘yoke’ as it refers to people and not to beasts of burden (see 1 Kings 12:4-14). As I was pondering that idea, I began to notice that when Engan men carry heavy logs on one shoulder, they often balance the load by supporting it with a small stick placed across the other shoulder. A few weeks ago, it clicked in my mind that the small stick they use to make it easier to carry a heavy log is like a yoke.
“Excited by this realization, I quickly asked my friend Benjamin if the stick that men use to make it easier to carry a heavy log has a name in Enga. Sure enough it does. It is called a pyakende. With great anticipation, I asked the translation team if we could use the word pyakende to translate the word ‘yoke’. After wrestling with the phrasing for a little while, we came up with the following translation: ‘In order to remove the heaviness from your shoulders, take my pyakende. When you have taken it, you will receive rest. As my pyakende helps you, what I give you to carry is not heavy and you will carry it without struggling.’”
“Yoke” is illustrated for use in Bible translations in East Africa by Pioneer Bible Translators like this:
Image owned by PBT and Jonathan McDaniel and licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Click or tap here to see a short video clip showing how yokes were used in biblical times (source: Bible Lands 2012)
In many languages, “events which are implied in a chronological sequence need to be inserted in the translation (…) In Luke 2:7 , after describing the birth of Jesus and his being laid in a manger, the text says, ‘because there was no room for them in the inn;’ in Enga the events were placed in chronological order and the words ‘she entered the cattle place and’ inserted before mentioning the birth, to account for Mary getting from the inn to the place of Jesus’s birth.”
The text of the verse in Enga: Dokopa Matiame baanya wane mupa ane doko mandea-pyaa. Mandipala lapalapame ambo pyapala mena pulumakawanya nee nenge tapoko mendenya setapala isoo petea-pyaa. Endakali opone palenge anda dokonya palipenge panda nasiamosa dopa pia-pyaa.
The Greek that is translated in English as “(I may) be cheered” or similar is translated into Enga as “my heart will go thud.”
Adam Boyd (in The PNG Experience ) tells the story: “One of the things I love about Enga is the rich metaphors it employs. Sometimes, however, these metaphors can be difficult to grasp at first. There is one particular metaphor that I have struggled to understand precisely: mona lyuu lenge. I knew that the entire phrase meant something like ‘to be at peace in your heart’. I also knew that mona meant ‘heart’ and that lenge meant ‘produce a sound’, but I really struggled to know what lyuu meant. Usually a word that comes before lenge is some sort of sound or speech, but what sound is produced when your heart is at peace?
“As we were translating Philippians 2:19, the team used this phrase to describe how Paul would feel when he received news of how the Philippians were doing. So I asked the team what exactly mona lyuu lenge meant. Often it is hard to get a straightforward answer to such questions, but the team explained that the literal meaning of lyuu lenge is the sound that is made when a large object hits the ground. For example, when a cluster of pandanus nuts [see here ] hits the ground, it makes such a sound. Finally I realized that the word lyuu literally means ‘thud’ and that lyuu lenge means ‘go thud’ or ‘make a thud sound.’
“Well, I was happy to figure out the literal meaning of the word lyuu, but I still couldn’t see what it had to do with being at peace in your heart. The team then further explained that when you feel anxious about something, it is like your heart is hung up on whatever it is that you are anxious about. But when your anxiety is relieved, your heart falls back into place. And when your heart falls back into place, metaphorically speaking, it makes a thud sound just like a cluster of pandanus nuts when it falls to the ground.
“So, in the Enga translation of Philippians 2:19, Paul literally writes, ‘When [Timothy] tells me how you are doing, I will hear and then my heart will go thud.’ I think my own heart went thud when I finally realized the meaning of this rich metaphor!”
“The difficulty in Enga is that there is no traditional concept or imagery of a lake that is made out of fire. Lakes are made out of water, not fire. And there is not even really one word for lake. Instead Enga people literally say water depression. Now the word depression is not referring to an emotional state in which a person is feeling sad, but rather it means ‘a sunken place or hollow on a surface.’ In other words it refers to an area where there is an indentation in the ground. And when the word depression is preceded by the word water, it indicates that the indentation in the ground is filled with water.
“So, knowing that the Enga people say water depression to talk about a lake, I of course suggested that we should translate lake of fire by saying fire depression. In other words, a sunken place or indentation on the surface of the earth that is filled with fire instead of water. Well, as often happens when I think that I have made a brilliant suggestion, I was met with blank stares. In Papua New Guinean cultures, people will often not disagree with you directly, but they will show their disagreement by simply ignoring what you say. Not only that, but it can be difficult to articulate why something doesn’t sound quite right. The translators knew that fire depression didn’t sound right, but they might not have been able to articulate right away why that was the case. English speakers also have the same problem. For example, a typical English speaker would immediately be able to recognize that goed is not the past tense of go, but if they had to explain why, they would run into difficulty. (It is because the past tense went is actually from the verb wend as in wend your way through a crowd.) So just as English speakers know when something does not sound right but can’t always explain why, Enga speakers also encounter difficulties in explaining why something sounds wrong, especially since most Enga speakers have never had any formal training in their own language. Well as we continued pondering the best translation, I kept ignoring the nonverbal cues and pushing for fire depression as our answer. Finally, it dawned on our lead translator Maniosa why fire depression did not sound right. He said, ‘Do you know what a fire depression is? It is the little fire pit that we have in our homes that we cook over.’
“What I was hoping would mean lake of fire actually just meant fire pit. Big difference! So the terminology that I was suggesting would have people envisioning that the lake of fire, which is supposed to be an intimidating image of the ultimate end for untold numbers of those whose names are not written in the book of life, was nothing more than the little fire pit where people cook food in their homes. In fact, if more than one or two people were thrown into a lake of fire like that, they would probably smother the fire and put it out, which is not quite what Jesus had in mind when he talked about the ‘fire that is not quenched.’ So we had to abandon the idea of using the term fire depression and translate lake of fire as the place where big fire continually burns. The idea that this fire is burning in a depression or indentation in the ground had to be left out because that concept created the wrong image of a fire pit where one cooks food in the house. And fire pits are considered to be useful things that help people cook. They are not places of punishment.”
In Chol it is translated as “big fire.” (Source: John Beekman in Notes on Translation, March 1965, p. 2ff.)
The Greek that is translated as “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’, or ‘No, No'” or similar in English is translated in Enga as “When you say that you will do something, just say that you will do it. When you say that you will not do something, just say that you will not do it.”
Adam Boyd (on his blog) explains: “In Enga, it is even more complex because there is no word for ‘Yes’; there is only a word for ‘No.’ So, to say ‘Yes,’ Engans restate the action of the verb in the affirmative. For example, if I were to ask Martha in Enga, ‘Did you go to the store?’ she would reply, ‘I went.’ If she wanted to reply, ‘No,’ she could either say ‘I didn’t go,’ or ‘No, I didn’t go.’ Engans also have shortcuts for the word ‘Yes.’ One shortcut is to utter something in between a grunt and a sigh; the other is to raise one’s eyebrows. I still have trouble with the raising of the eyebrows. Often I find myself repeating a question over and over again when I forget that raised eyebrows means ‘Yes.’ Instead, I think that people have just misunderstood me or perhaps did not hear me.
“This makes things difficult when translating Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:37, ‘Let your word be ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no.’’ This is further complicated by the fact that the context of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:37 is his command not to swear any oaths at all. Not only does Enga have no word for ‘yes,’ but Enga also has no proper word for ‘oath.’ At first, we translated the idea of swearing an oath as ‘say that you are speaking very truly,’ but we soon discovered that such a translation would not work as Jesus himself frequently says, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you.’ So after much consideration, we translated ‘swear an oath’ as ‘say the name of something and then say very truly that you will do something.’ We found this to be an acceptable translation because swearing an oath usually requires invoking the name of God or something else (such as the saying, ‘I swear on my mother’s grave’). Having solved the problem of translating ‘swear an oath,’ we were then able to translate Jesus’ words, ‘Let your word be ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no,” as ‘When you say that you will do something, just say that you will do it. When you say that you will not do something, just say that you will not do it.'”
While translating Mark 6:14-16 into Enga the translators had to decide on the nature of evidence that is quoted here.
Adam Boyd on his blog) explains: “”When drawing conclusions in Enga, a person has to state whether the evidence for the conclusion is visual or non-visual. So, for example, with King Herod, it is clear that his conclusion that Jesus was John the Baptist was based on non-visual evidence, namely, the reports that he had been hearing. But what about the other people who concluded that Jesus was Elijah or one of the prophets? Were their conclusions based on seeing Jesus in action or were their conclusions based only on reports that they had heard about Jesus. The text of Scripture doesn’t tell us, but in Enga, we are required to answer this question. So we decided that the reports of others were based on visual evidence, assuming that the reports had come, at least initially, from people who had been eye-witnesses of Jesus’ miraculous works.”
