As part of our research, one of our goals is to visualize the distribution and development of Bible translations and to make the resulting interactive world map available to researchers on a dedicated website. This will make it easier to analyse such relationships as those between colonial expansion and the global distribution of the Bible. We have sourced a number of books that list various Bible translations. These books provide lots of dates, names, and places associated with the translation of the Bible into about 1400 languages. It would have been conceivable for us to manually enter all the data of interest from our various data sources to the project into a database ourselves. This would have taken a lot of time that we can save with DH tools. Nevertheless, we still have to do a lot of work before the data can be feed into our database. In order to extract this selected data, it is necessary to ensure that the books were in a machine-readable format that can be further processed by the computer. To do this, we needed an optical character recognition tool (OCR). We opted for the open-source program OCR4all from the University of Würzburg. For our process, the following essential steps are required:
Preprocessing
In this step, each individual page we are interested in is categorized into different sections. This is necessary for a subsequent step of optical character recognition (OCR). In the preprocessing step, for example, a distinction is already made between the year of certain translations and the number of speakers of a particular language. This differentiation of different numbers would hardly be possible for the AI and must therefore be prepared manually.
Text Recognition
Now the first automated text recognition takes place, as is also known from programs such as Adobe Acrobat or similar. However, this first run is based on a very general model that is not yet tailored to the specifics of the book. Accordingly, there are still many errors, such as the confusion of O and 0. In this state, the data cannot be used for our purposes.
Correction of the automated text recognition
Any incorrect results from step 2 must now be corrected manually. However, this does not involve correcting the entire corpus that we created, rather only a fraction. These must be meticulously checked to see whether the text recognition matches the original and, if necessary, changes must be made. This quickly reveals typical errors that the program has repeatedly made, such as not recognizing special characters or accents.
Training an adapted text recognition model
The data resulting from the previous step is now used by the program to create a machine learning model with which the text recognition is tailored to the corpus. This significantly reduces the error rate.
Application of the improved model
The optimized model is now applied and the text recognition step is repeated.
Correcting the result again
Once again, a limited number of pages are corrected manually, thereby increasing the data set for further improvement of the AI model.
Repeat steps 3-6 until the text recognition has been optimized
Finalization
Theoretically, this should be the process. Unfortunately, not everything always works as intended and so we also encountered problems that we had to deal with. Unfortunately, step 4 only worked once and since then we have had problems with the program. Therefore, we had to correct many of the passages of the book that were relevant to our regional focus (Arctic, Australia and Oceania, West Africa) completely by hand.
1. Compiling a list of the relevant regional languages
Using a keyword search, I compiled a list of a few hundred languages from the regions mentioned.
These languages were also linked to their respective data in the Glottolog, an open-access website that lists all the world’s languages and links them to identification codes, among other things. The linking of language and the so-called glottocode will facilitate future research and was planned for the final map. The difficulty in this step lies in the names of the languages. Languages often have different names, which may differ from our base sources and in the “Glottolog” database. Some names are also outdated or may only include one dialect today, meaning that they are no longer considered independent languages.
3. Manual correction of the respective sections
Correcting the individual pages is a relatively time-consuming process in which you always have to compare the original lines with the generated ones. As a result, you have to read every line of the corpus twice. This limits the reading pleasure, as does the often keyword-like text structure, so that you have to make a concerted effort to concentrate.
Nevertheless, there are always exciting passages and amazing anecdotes in our sources. I was often impressed by the great personal commitment of people who often translated the Bible into languages that only had a few hundred speakers. I would like to briefly present one of the best and extreme stories here, namely the story of the Bible translation into the Auca language:
Auca is one such micro-language with just 300 speakers, the Warani, who live in the Ecuadorian jungle. As early as the 17th century, there was peaceful contact between the Warani and a Jesuit priest who lived among them for several years. However, his successor was murdered and contact with the tribe was broken off. It was not until around 300 years later, in 1956, that there was another attempt to Christianize the Warani. A group of five missionaries led by Nathaniel Saint set out to convert the Warani, but all five members of the company were also murdered. Amazingly, this terrible event motivated Rachel Saint, Nathaniel Saint’s sister, and Betty Elliott, widow of one of the murdered missionaries, to try again – this time successfully. Thanks to the great efforts of these women, the entire tribe was evangelized ten years later and the Gospel of Mark was translated. In 1965, the children of the deceased Nathaniel Saint were baptized in the Curaray River at the site of their father’s murder. The baptism was performed by one of the men involved in the murder of their father.
From: Nida, Eugene A. (ed.) Book of a Thousand Tongues. 2nd ed., United Bible Societies, 1972, p. 69.
The Global Bible project is focussing on three case study regions: the Arctic, Australia and Oceania and West Africa. This blog relates to missions to the Inuit people of the Arctic. After the defeat of the United Kingdom of Denmark Norway in the Napoleonic wars, the British and Foreign Bible Society was more actively involved in supporting and publishing translations into the Inuit languages of Greenland and British North America.
In 1821, English readers were encouraged by remarkable news from the Moravian missions in Labrador. In their ‘Monthly Extracts’, the Bible Society reported that the Moravian missionaries in Okkak, Labrador, August 8, 1821, thanked the Society for the ‘valuable present of more copies of the New Testament in the Esquimaux language’ (Latrobe 1821). From Nain, there was a report of an even more practical and enthusiastic reception. Brother Benjamin Kohlmeister (1756-1844), wrote that ‘several of our Esquimaux’ had decided ‘of their own accord’ to make a collection of seal blubber for the Society (Kohlmeister 1821: 103). Some brought whole seals, others smaller sections in the name of their children. Having received their own version of the Bible, they now wished to see the work continued for peoples elsewhere.
They begged me to send this collection of blubber (yielding 30 gallons of oil) to those generous friends who printed the Bibles for them, that more heathen might be presented with that book ‘so precious above all things.’
Kohlmeister’s letter was soon copied by other evangelical journals (Christian Observer 1821: 787) as a particularly pleasing response to the British and Foreign Bible Society which had funded and shipped the ‘Esquimaux Bible’ to the Moravian missions in North America.
At one level, the Moravian report is a strong indication of the agency of the new Moravian Christians in Newfoundland. It also reflected the ethos of the Bible Society, which discouraged the gratuitous distribution of Bibles, even among the very poor, in favour of a subscription. In England, a local committee (Dudley 1821: 412) reported, ‘The readiness of the poor to make their periodical payments is most gratifying.’ The Bible was a privilege to be earned, not imposed or given away without recognition of its cost.
The Global Bible project is examining how the extension of these principles impacts on the translation of the Bible among non-literate peoples in areas of expanding European colonisation. For the Inuit people of Greenland, this meant encounters mediated through missionaries from German lands, especially Lutherans and Moravians. Moravians were also active in British North America and in Newfoundland they secured more or less exclusive access to trade and proselytise the local people. As traders, the Moravians were the catalyst for dramatic changers in the economy of the Inuit peoples of the North.
Blubber was the medium of exchange, not just for Bibles but for the whole exchange economy.
As Brice Bennett (1990), the Moravians were traders and closely implicated in the commercialization of the arctic frontier. The Moravians created mission stations with an attached trade store, which allowed for the exchange of European items including weapons (though not initially), ironware, tobacco and other goods which were exchanged for seal oil, furs and Inuit artefacts, including carvings. For the Greenlanders, the principal tradable commodity was rendered fat from sea mammals, a product which had never formed part of the traditional economy.
For the Global Bible project, it is important to place the effort to translate the bible into the wider colonial context. While the new bible translations were undoubtedly received with enthusiasm, there were also hidden costs.
Research on this case study is ongoing and we are particularly interested in the way in which missionaries from German lands collaborated with British missionary and Bible societies beyond national and international boundaries.
References
Brice-Bennett, Carol. 1990. ‘Missionaries as Traders: Moravians and Labrador Inuit, 1771-1860’. In Merchant-Credit and Labour Strategies in Historical Perspective, ed. Rosemary E. Ommer (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press).
Dudley, C.S. 1821. An Analysis of the System of the Bible Society (London: Watts). Google Books
Kohlmeister 1821. ‘Extract of a Letter from Brother Kohlmeister’. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren 8: 103-4. Memorial University of Newfoundland DAI
Latrobe, Rev. C.J. 1821, ‘Labrador and Greenland’, Monthly Extracts from the Correspondence of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 17.52: 68-71
On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the sea was full of U-boats; on the morning of the conference, the news arrived of the Belgian capitulation. What better moment to discuss the state of Biblical translation on the African continent? The conference report contrasted the shared sentiment that “lights were going out one by one in Europe” with the “unquenchable optimism” of those present, “a band of men moving towards the sunlight”; the opening speaker called to mind that the BFBS had also been founded at a time when Napoleon was plotting his invasion of England.
The African Languages conference at Bible House, 29 May 1940
The occasion for the conference was to discuss a series of reports by the BFBS secretary for Africa, W.J. Wiseman, and the outcomes of a questionnaire sent out to missionaries and missionary societies (all in BFBS archives, Cambridge University Library: GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/F2/9/8, marked as ‘confidential’; no outcomes of the conference seem to have been published). Between 1937 and 1939, Wiseman had made two large inspection tours along missionary stations and Bible colporteurs in sub-Saharan Africa and on the larger islands, covering more than 40,000 miles by plane, boat, lorry, and any other means of transport. The purpose of this was to survey the efficacy of Bible translations. While the BFBS mission was to make the Bible available to all people in their own language, in practice the cost and difficulties associated with producing a full translation – printed and shipped from Britain – were proportionally larger for smaller languages, and the reliability of the translations hard to ascertain except in situ. Meanwhile cheap Bibles were being mass-produced in European languages; Wiseman quotes customer complaints that “The price of a small French New Testament in Douala was 2 francs, while a New Testament in the local language (in the same bookshop) was priced 10 francs. The African cannot understand why prices to Europeans are so much lower. We point out that the books are smaller; then he, too, wants a smaller book.”
Questionnaires and Language Engineering
The question with which Wiseman was travelling the continent, then, was not only which languages still did not have a Bible translation and which translations needed revision, but also which language communities could be served more easily through a cognate language, a larger (trade) language such as Hausa or Swahili, or even the colonizer’s language. How to demarcate a ‘language’ within a language continuum or dialect cluster was more than a theoretical issue here: apart from the money and effort involved, translation also implied creating a standard written language and thereby cementing or reshuffling linguistic hierarchies. About Lingala, for instance, Wiseman reported that “We are told that the language is being stabilised along the line of the New Testament speech”. To get this picture clearer, and expressly to avoid wasted effort, the questionnaire that the BFBS sent out requested missionaries to indicate
The BFBS questionnaire as filled in by Rev. Taylor
The language of your district.
Boundaries of the language area.
(a) Number who speak the language.
(b) Number of Christians.
What progress has been made since 1930
(a) in the number of Christians?
(b) in the literacy of the tribe?
Is the language known to other tribes?
What relation does it bear to other tongues?
Which is the principal language?
…as well as the state of extant translations, work in progress, and further translation work needed. Most tellingly, and somewhat chillingly, the last question was about the viability of the language:
Is (a) a European language, (b) a trade language, (c) another principal language, likely to supplant that of your tribe?
As questionnaires go, the response was uneven; the most detailed information was provided by the Conseil Protestant du Congo Belge, from whom Wiseman desired ‘a wide statesmanlike view of the whole Congo field’ notwithstanding the fact that the Protestant mission in Congo was seriously outnumbered in the field by its Catholic rivals. More modestly, the Conseil’s secretary offered a criticism of the state-sponsored overview of Les Peuplades du Congo Belge (1937), which was “based on very incomplete data” and “not reliable in details. Furthermore, no map can indicate accurately the overlapping of tribes which is almost universal” – a picture further complicated by “the penetration of trade-languages and government languages”. Echoing Wiseman’s concerns, the Conseil Protestant’s secretary stressed the ‘tragic wastefulness’ of some translation efforts in the past:
There was no means to estimate the potential usefulness of a language. Wherever a gifted and energetic linguist happened to settle, a translation was made. The tragic wastefulness of this is evident to-day in the versions used by limited and declining numbers of people, often bea[u]tiful and scholarly versions, such as the Bobangi Bible, the Inkongo Bible [and] the Luba-Sanga Bible; and in the multiple versions which have divided people instead of uniting them, as in the case of Kikongo, Ngala, Lunda, and the many varieties of Luba.
The 1940 BFBS conference brings to mind a similar conference that had been hosted at the Prussian embassy in London eighty-six years earlier, the so-called ‘Alphabetic Conference’ convened by Baron Bunsen and the CMS Secretary, John Venn. There, the discussion had been about a uniform system of phonetic transcription for non-European languages, to be used by missionaries and philologists alike; along with an unlikely list of leading scholars from different fields, all the main Protestant missionary societies had been represented. If the 1854 conference had sought to establish a framework for standardized Bible translation, the 1940 conference was taking stock. Enquiries were made by Wiseman into 59 African languages; appended to his reports was a longer list of 204 languages, with ticks to indicate if that language possessed ‘Bibles’, ‘Testaments’ (generally the New), or ‘Portions’. On the carbon copy, where the column ‘Bible’ was empty, Wiseman indicated in red ink what other languages could fill the gaps. Most listed were Hausa, Swahili, Kikongo, English, and Portuguese.
Wiseman’s list of languages and translations, with annotations in red ink
What Wiseman was delivering at the BFBS conference, then, was effectively both an ethnolinguistic survey and a business report. Though Wiseman never intended his work as a contribution to linguistic scholarship, and did not delve into linguistic details, he may well have been at more places in Africa to gather information about languages in the area where they were spoken than any Africanist. More technical linguistic information must have been provided at the conference by Ida Ward, at that point Head of the Department of African Studies at SOAS, who is listed as a speaker about “Bible translations and new orthographies”. She had been involved in the making of the Africa Alphabet, a version of the Latin alphabet supplemented with IPA characters. Whether or not to adopt it was a major issue for the BFBS, although the resolution passed about orthography was functionally vague (“a modern orthography, where possible acceptable to the Government of the country, and based upon the principles recognized by the Bible Society and by all the missions concerned”).
Bible Industry
The local detail in Wiseman’s reports, rather, is about the commercial realities of selling Bibles in the colonies. In Northern Nigeria, the use of box tricycles enabled the colporteurs to cover greater distances in less time; and as “the methods adopted will create a desire for literacy, the Government is showing interest in this effort”. One colporteur targeting Indians in East Africa was taken to task because “he is apparently mainly occupied in evangelical work. The Secretary impressed upon the friends responsible for this work at Nairobi that the Bible Society’s grant is to be taken for selling the scriptures among Indians.” A more industrious colporteur in Kenya, however, was applauded for creatively piecing together his own means of transport and thereby saving the Society the cost of buying and running a truck:
The Rev. J.G. Stephenson has built a large comfortable motor colportage caravan, with special back-door shelves opening in the form of a bookstall and with ample accommodation for carrying stocks of books. A large photograph of this caravan can be seen in the Secretary’s office at the Bible House. Mr. Stephenson is prepared to undertake four-monthly winter tours, November to February, the best season of the year for such operations, wholly in the interest of the Bible Society. […] The total expense to the Bible Society for such a tour of four months is about £ 125. This is enormously less in cost than any scheme hitherto submitted. The Secretary has seen the man and the van and unreservedly recommends that the Committee should undertake a trial for these four months of the Winter season.
Unfortunately no photograph of Stephenson’s ingenious vehicle has been kept in the archive folder, but a resolution was passed (to general cheer, one imagines) to grant him the £ 125.
In his reports on Bible sales, Wiseman comes across more as a travelling sales agent than as a missionary, making a cool-headed assessment of profits and losses. Here the image of tinkering in local conditions stands in stark contrast to the industrial scale of operations, with 1,200 colporteurs active and sales of up to 56,415 Bibles (in Madagascar) yearly. To allay any fears that “Christian organisations are not alert and businesslike”, Wiseman provided reassurance that the Bible was an unbeatable best-seller and the BFBS outperformed all competitors, even if sales across West Africa had gone down in recent years because a slump in the cacao industry had left people destitute. Still, the very fact that the otherwise parsimonious BFBS spent a considerable sum on Wiseman’s two six-month inspection tours is a sign that selling the Word was by no means easy business, and his reports repeatedly emphasized how language variety – among other factors – was a liability:
For various reasons Africa is not yet so feasible a proposition for colportage as India and China. The peoples of the Orient live in huge centres of population and tens of millions can be reached in one language alone. In parts of Africa languages change in every fifty miles, money is very rarely needed and therefore seldom available, also, worst of all, often more than ninety percent of the people are wholly illiterate.
But contrary to that grim assessment, he stated on the same page that “more Bibles are sold in [Equatorial] Africa alone than in the whole of India and China by all Bible Societies combined”; in West Africa mission bookshops avowedly held an almost complete monopoly over the stationery and book trade. The result of this Bible industry was nothing less than a cultural transformation on a continental scale. Since the late 2010s, Africa is the continent with the largest Christian population, whereas Christianity has remained a minority religion in India and China.
Wiseman’s reports and the general tone of the conference were inevitably paternalistic. Interest in African cultures and traditions was nil, unless where it affected sales; Africa was the ‘Dark Continent’, converts were viewed as a flock, and local salesmen described as lazy and unreliable (except for one Colporteur Sododo, “a clean, neat, alert and happy-looking man” and former tailor who was making phenomenal sales on the Gold Coast). But if the BFBS imagined the future largely in terms of a mission civilisatrice, that future also included African leadership. A clear power shift occurred in the Kingwana (Congolese Copperbelt Swahili) version, where the voice of native translators was given primacy – as the head of the Stanleyville mission reported, in the full awareness of the impact of its language engineering:
We had a splendid Language Conference, with about forty present, mostly evangelists. We had before them the pure SWAHILI of Zanzibar and copies of the versions from Stanleyville and Ruwenzori and our old style and the new mss I was working upon. At the request of the natives, we whites left and they continued the discussion themselves.
In the afternoon we met together. They had decided that we as a Mission ought to take up the Stanleyville dialect known as the LUABALA KINGWANA. Because it is so different from our old style of speaking, the change-over will be a tremendous task, involving all our printed matter – Hymnbooks, Primers, Readers, etc. – and to change the spelling as well as the grammatical construction will amount to almost learning a new language. But it will be worth while. It is ‘a disturbing of the present to establish the future’. All agreed that it is much fuller in expression and vocabulary.
In line with GloBil’s interest in spotlighting the agency of global majority/mother-tongue translators who collaborated with missionary linguists to translate the Bible into their own mother tongues in the colonial era, I am currently poring over archives of the Bremen Mission (Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) on the translation of the Bible into Ewe, the dominant language of German Togoland, spoken in present day southern Togo and south-eastern Ghana.
Excerpt of a BFBS archive of Mr. Spieth’s report of 1909 to the BFBS on progress of Ewe Bible translation in Tübingen which reveals Adzaklo’s competence as a Bible translator.
Several favourable circumstances have worked together for the successful performance of our task. The first of these is the ability of the native assistant, who was placed at my disposal by the North German Missionary Society. Ludwig Adzaklo…”
Ludwig Adzaklo, taken from Emil Ohly (1920:31)
My preliminary discovery is one young Ewe mother-tongue speaker, Ludwig Adzaklo (1882-c?), who spent 5 years (1904- 1909) in Tübingen (Germany) co-translating the Ewe Old Testament with Missionary Jakob Spieth (of the Bremen Mission) under the sponsorship of the BFBS. As the above excerpt from a BFBS archive indicates, his competence was essential to the success of the Ewe Bible translation project in Tübingen. However, Adzaklo’s role has not (as yet) been adequately recognized and fully appreciated, being considered only as a language assistant (Sprachgehilfe in German) to Spieth, who in turn is acclaimed as the great Bible translator of the Ewe people (Bibelübersetzer des Ewevolkes) of the early twentieth century. Yet the existing archival evidence suggests Adzaklo played more than an auxiliary role in an enterprise that was sustained by a complex network of Bible societies with the BFBS playing the dominant role.
Fascinated by this, I am currently drafting alongside a research paper from a post-colonial perspective with the hypothesis that Ludwig Adzaklo is better seen as a mother-tongue co-Bible translator alongside Missionary Jakob Spieth, and not just a Sprachgehilfe to the latter.
Look out for the next updates on what we discover further about Ludwig Adzaklo, the young Ewe co-Bible translator of the Ewe Bible in the early twentieth century of German Togoland.
Michael Wandusim (Dr.) Postdoc Research Associate GloBil Team in Münster
