The Emancipating Potential of Source-Languages Within Gateway Language Translation Workflows

The relatively recent and widespread adoption of gateway language (GL) and oral translation approaches has enabled the global church to accelerate and also to own the production of new Bible translations, in part by reducing dependence on rare human resources who possess deep source-language skills. However, the GL resources may themselves cause all kinds of ethical issues, regarding historical, cultural and linguistic aspects : they may tend to become a new form of dependence, as they stand between lingual communities and the historical sources, and because they inevitably bake in theological and linguistic choices that are not settled in the source texts.

This paper argues for the liberating potential of providing routes back to source languages in GL-based translation workflows, and presents one way to do this based on juxtalinear diglots – a methodology originally used in Europe in the 19th Century to teach classical languages to school children. The production, digital processing and practical use of such resources is explored, based on the experiences of the author’s work on GL translations of some New Testament books with Europeans and Africans. This presentation will therefore focus on Greek. One specific application of this approach may be in the post-draft checking of oral translations, enabling such projects to demonstrate linguistic and exegetical rigour while retaining naturalness.