The occasion for the conversation was the widespread opinion that the Synodal translation is sufficient, since Russian is «more or less known by everyone» in Russia and the CIS countries. Desnitsky disagreed with this neither as a philologist nor as a Christian: in his words, people from the national outskirts, for whom Russian is not their native language, «will either read the Bible in their own language or never read it at all.» In the national regions, he observed, Russian is known at a «kitchen» level—not enough to read a complex biblical text.
The interviewee described his work at the Institute for Bible Translation not merely as scholarly activity: as an Orthodox Christian, he sees it as a way to bear witness to Christ in the most natural manner for a philologist. He quoted a Karelian woman who, after reading the Gospel in Karelian, felt that Christ had walked through Karelian villages and spoken to people in their language.
How a translation is organized
Each translation into a national language is a separate project worked on by a team. The translators are native speakers, usually writers, journalists, scholars; they are required to have a masterly command of their native language and an openness to the Christian worldview, but not necessarily to be Christians—among the translators there are Muslims, Buddhists, and non-believers. This is explained by the fact that some peoples have only a handful of Christians, or none at all.
Next, a theological editor works on the text—a Christian who knows the target language, ancient Hebrew, and ancient Greek, and who has received a systematic education in theology and linguistics. Then a philological editor, a native speaker, joins in to correct the style, and his corrections are reviewed by the theological editor. After that, the translation is tested by native speakers and checked by a consultant who monitors compliance with general requirements.
Work usually begins with the Gospel of Luke: it is naturally followed by the Acts of the Apostles, written, according to Desnitsky, by the same author; moreover, this Gospel is more understandable to readers and literarily superior to the Gospel of Mark. A complete Bible translation is planned only for languages with a large number of speakers, such as Tatar and Chuvash; where speakers number in the hundreds or tens, the Gospel is translated.
The resistance of language
Desnitsky sees the main difficulty in the fact that language does not always allow one to say what is needed. «Christ was incarnate» in Altai had to be rendered as «Christ became a man»: the literal version «Christ came with meat and blood» sounded to the nomadic people as if Christ had come with groceries. In the Tajik Gospel of John, the combination of «manna» and the pronoun «man» («I») created the impression that the fathers «ate Me in the desert,» so an explanation was added to the text. The Shor language has no words for «thornbush» and «vineyard,» and in Chukchi «lamb» became «fawn»—thus preserving the nuance of something small and touching.
A separate difficulty is the structure of the languages: most of them are Turkic or Finno-Ugric, and a literal translation from Russian or Greek would yield nonsense. Where there is no written language or it is barely mastered, translations are recorded on audio media, and sometimes an alphabet was created for a previously unwritten language.
Attitudes on the ground
According to Desnitsky, the reaction of the local population is of three types: rejection («we don't need this»), extremely positive—people see the translation of Scripture as raising the status of their language—and properly Christian. He noted that representatives of non-Christian religions often regard the translations favorably: at the presentation of the Tuvan New Testament, a lama and a shaman were present, and both approved of the book. A mullah from a small Caucasian village, having received the Gospel, said that now he had something to preach about on Fridays. A Muslim woman translator, according to his account, asked a mufti whether she would sin against Allah, and he told her to translate as it is.
At the same time, rejection also occurred, and it came, in Desnitsky's assessment, not so much from theological as from nationalist considerations: people said that to be a Tatar meant to be a Muslim, and that reading the Bible in their native language would supposedly make them «less Tatar.»
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