Hot topic III

God in Arabic (Wikipedia)

     

When Manal and I try to communicate, most of what we say gets lost. The other day I saw her try out a new app that uses the camera on the phone like a magnifying glass, translating the words right onto the screen as you move the phone over them. It didn’t work all that well. Sigh. Google Translate seems to help me out more than it does her. Maybe there is more effort invested in getting it right from English to Arabic than the other way around. Or maybe, since I’ve learned several languages before, I have experience in breaking one idea down into small, simple phrases that Google can handle more easily. Manal is learning how to do this, too—keeping it simple. At first she spoke entire paragraphs into the Translator, and it spoke back gibberish. Now we use a kind of short hand, relying on the few words we know in each other’s languages, and our phones, to talk about all kinds of things. Today I found it fun that when I met her friend Wofa, Manal was translating my questions to her and relaying her answers (some of them, anyway). But still, much was lost. 

Where I live in Oaxaca, I know many of the translator teams that work hard at getting the Bible published into the 300+ languages of Mexico. I help teach their kids so that they are freed up to do their job instead of having to home school. I am happy to support them in this way, each of us using our own gift to help one another get the job done. These translator teams wrestle and consult and pray over their decisions about what words to use to communicate God’s truth effectively and accurately in Indian languages. It is hard work, and sometimes they disagree on the correct terms. Sometimes they go back and make revisions. While I am analyzing literature with their kids in the classroom, trying to decipher the authors’ intentions, trying to get at the true meaning of the scenes and images, their parents are doing the same thing with the Bible. God blesses both jobs.

One of the articles that I read in the Christianity Today bulletin about the question “Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?” fascinated me with some details about how this same translation process works when the Bible is written in Arabic in other countries. Shortened a bit, Jay Travis, a missionary and scholar, says:

Telling Muslims that we worship different Gods makes it nearly impossible to use the dozens of Bible translations available that use the term Allah. When Muslims find the name Allah there, ah, they breathe an immediate sigh of relief! Many Bible translations over the centuries have used the name Allah for God. All translations in Arabic dating back to the 9th century used Allah, and this name is still on the lips of millions of Arabic-speaking Christians today. Arabic-speaking Christians, in fact, used the name Allah centuries before the dawn of Islam, as did Arabic-speaking Jews, saying it was the Arabic form of the Aramaic word for God. (It is interesting to note that when Jews translated the OT from Hebrew into Arabic in the 10th century, they used the name Allah). These facts indicate that Allah can be seen as simply the common word for God in the Arabic language. Similarly, translations in Indonesian and Malaysian beginning with the first Malay Scripture portions in the early 1600s have always used Allah. Over thirty languages, counting over 100 million believers, have Bibles today that use the name Allah for God.

Interestingly, the mosque here in St Catharines uses the word God in the lettering of the Shahada on its wall. On the other hand in Malaysia, Christians are forbidden to use the word Allah in their literature because the government believes this facilitates conversion. If I’m forced to choose a side on the question (like I said before, it’s not a helpful question), it’s the side of those 100 million believers using the word Allah for God, and the seekers that sigh with relief that God lives in the Christian Scriptures. They have far more at stake. For now, relying on the little experience and evidence I have, I defer to them. 

While we argue over the translation of God's name, may he not be one of the things that gets lost in the process.