Research Archives

A Tale of Two Translators

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Linguistic fieldwork in the Indonesian archipelago, throughout the 19th century, was largely the province of the Dutch Bible Society (NBG). Two Bible translators stand out for their contributions to linguistic scholarship: J.F.C. Gericke on Javanese in the late 1820s-1850s, and Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk on Toba Batak, Malay, Lampung, Balinese, and various other languages in the second half of the century. Their methods were as similar as their personalities were different. Gericke was pious, deferential, a bit naïve, and well liked by the colonial and Javanese elites; Van der Tuuk was an inveterate polemicist and open atheist who went half native, and whose eccentricities and vituperative letters earned him something of a legendary status.

Both figure prominently in J.L. Swellengrebel’s history of the NBG in Indonesia, In Leijdeckers Voetspoor (2 vols., 1974-78); but while little has been written about Gericke since, Van der Tuuk’s correspondence as preserved in the NBG archives has been edited not once but twice. The titles of both collections are telling: Rob Nieuwenhuis’ pocket volume of letters selected for their historical or literary merit is called De Pen in Gal Gedoopt (the pen dipped in bile, 1962/82), while Kees Groeneboer’s near-exhaustive annotated edition bears the title Een Vorst onder de Taalgeleerden (a king among linguists, 2002). Annoyingly enough, the sole passages that Groeneboer sometimes intentionally omits are about linguistic details.

The two editions of Van der Tuuk’s correspondence, 1962/82 and 2002

What both Gericke and Van der Tuuk (as well as other NBG translators) did was set up a philological cottage industry with up to half a dozen local staff. Together with their writers and language teachers (guru bahasa), they collected and edited Indonesian manuscripts, compiled a grammar and a dictionary of the target language before setting to translation work. In Gericke’s case, the preparatory work also included setting up a short-lived Javanese language institute at Surakarta (1832-42) modelled on Fort William College; Van der Tuuk devoted part of his energies to the revision of the main Dutch-Malay dictionary. On their deaths they left two of the richest collections of Indonesian manuscripts, now in Leiden University Library. But is particularly through their periodical, lengthy letters to the NBG that their work can be followed. In effect, these are among the most detailed (and in Gericke’s case, the first) linguistic fieldwork reports from the 19th century.

 

A Patchwork of Languages (and Religions)

The colonial language dynamics within which the NBG operated was quite complicated. Colonial Indonesia (or the ‘Dutch East Indies’) was a patchwork of hundreds of languages, of which a dozen had their own writing systems. Malay was the lingua franca of the archipelago, of which the high literary register, written in adapted Arabic Javi script, differed quite strongly from the trade language and local varieties. Javanese was the largest language in terms of native speakers, with a literary tradition going back to the 9th or 10th century CE; at the core of that tradition was a corpus in Old Javanese (Kawi, ‘poet’, from Sanskrit kāvya) largely derived from Hindu epics and enacted at wayang shadow puppet plays. The Kawi corpus and language, however, had been preserved better on Bali, which had remained (and still is) largely Hindu while most of Java had converted to Islam. Batak, on which Van der Tuuk worked, was a language cluster on Central Sumatra of which most speakers adhered to Indigenous religious traditions. These were only some of the larger languages within the sphere of Dutch colonial and missionary activities; by 1936, the NBG proclaimed to have translated the Bible into 33 languages.

Language map of Indonesia showing the language area of NBG translations, 1936

That linguistic patchwork also clearly reflected religious rivalries and religious syncretism. All the Indonesian writing systems, like those of Southern India, derived from Brahmi, and had developed together with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. Malay, on the other hand, was strongly linked to the spread of Islam, still ongoing in the 19th century, and the preponderance of Malay is the main reason why Dutch, though officially the language of colonial administration, did not become a ‘world language’ like French or Spanish. But Indonesian and especially Javanese Islam was thoroughly syncretic, with Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist elements. When Gericke arrived in Surakarta to translate the Bible into Javanese, the Java War (1825-30) was still raging, in which Dutch colonial rule was challenged by the charismatic prince Diponegoro, who styled himself as both a traditional wayang hero and a sufi seer. In an early letter, Gericke recounts a visit to a “Javanese Seminary [pesantrèn ≈ madrassa] for the formation of priests” from which a lot of Diponegoro’s following had been recruited (as well as, presumably, Gericke’s own language teachers):

The number of students before the war was nearly 3000; now there are barely 200. The Emperor of Surakarta has bequeathed 31 dessas (villages) to it for its maintenance. Teaching consists mainly of learning to read the Qu’ran and memorizing the five daily prayers. Moreover students are educated in the secrets of the Buddhists and Betoros [Hindu deities], which have been preserved by the priests either through tradition or in their books after the conversion of the Javanese to Islam.

The letter is telling in a number of ways, not only about religious syncretism and religious politics but also about Gericke’s own attitudes. Though loyal to the Dutch authorities – he argued that “nothing can be achieved without them” – he became increasingly critical of their offhand treatment of the Javanese, and gained a lot of prestige by getting the head of the pesantrèn out of prison. After that, he visited the ruins of the Buddhist temple complex Borobudur, speculated about Buddhism as a purely philosophical religion, and dreamed of a journey to Bali to learn proper Kawi. He stands in stark contrast to his predecessor/rival as a translator, the Baptist missionary Gottlob Brückner, whose entire edition of the New Testament in Javanese, printed at Serampore, was seized by the Dutch authorities because he was also distributing anti-Islamic tracts right after the end of the Java War.

Van der Tuuk’s attitudes were a lot more antagonistic than Gericke’s. He regarded Bible translation as a hopeless task because each language was so deeply ingrained with a specific – religious – worldview that any translation would go either against the spirit of the language or of Christianity. Yet while he loathed the task, the one positive role he saw for Christianity was as an antidote to Islam, which he loathed even more and which was rapidly making inroads in the Batak lands. (Nowadays, Batak religiosity is roughly 55% Christian / 45% Islam.) Nor did he have many kind words to spare for Chinese traders, Javanese servants, Lampung peasants, the local nobility, Dutch missionaries, or the Gouvernement. Ironically, after an early incident in which he tendered his leave in a heavy fit of tropical fever, his relations with the NBG remained quite good throughout, although they knew full well that he was not a ‘theologizer’: they tolerated his eccentricities and heterodoxies because of his unmistakable merits as a linguist. When he finally left the NBG for a much-better paid position in the civil service in 1873, his last letter to them a month later already expressed regrets because his new employers were much more narrow-minded and less respectful of his intellectual independence.

Van der Tuuk’s cottage industry was also decidedly more messy. While Gericke mainly interacted with Javanese clergy and nobility and worked in the proximity of the court of Surakarta, Van der Tuuk decided quickly that Batak as spoken in the district capital was too ‘contaminated’ with Malay and settled in another harbour town, welcoming and paying anyone who could provide him with stories, manuscripts, or instruction in the various Batak dialects. One visitor recounts the scene:

He started by taking a teacher – a Guru – into his house. This man soon became his loyal companion, who ate and drank with him and accompanied him on many walks. Van der Tuuk asserted that, by talking to this Guru in all circumstances, he would soonest find out all the subtleties of the language. And it turned out he was right, for soon he felt able to have long discussions with all kinds of people from the hinterlands. He used the evenings to begin with his grammar; most often he was working until late at night. When I knocked on his door at six to go to the bustling river, he was often very sleepy still. I sometimes wondered at the sight of a half a dozen Batak strangers sound asleep in his parlour.

Van der Tuuk even floated the idea of marrying a Batak girl to learn the language more intimately – itself an indication of how, even while going half native, he still thought from a colonial perspective. He complained about the difficulty of finding good writers and servants in Barus, and two of his Batak teachers left after one of his fits of ire. If Gericke’s relationship with his teachers was much more formal, we also know more about his longtime instructor, Mas Ngabehi Ranuwito, than about any of Van der Tuuk’s associates, whom he hardly ever mentions by name.

The Resurrection of Kawi

Although there had been 17th/18th-century colonial studies of Malay (including various dictionaries and a Bible translation), systematic study of the languages of Indonesia only started with the creation of a central government during the British occupation of Java (1811-16). Kawi, as the most ancient and high-prestige language, played a central role in it: a hundred pages in Vice Governor Stamford Raffles’ History of Java (1817) are devoted to Javanese literature and a translation/synopsis/ commentary of the Brata Yudha (the 12th-century Kawi adaptation of a section of the Mahabharata), based on manuscripts plundered from the kraton (palace) of Yogyakarta and made with the aid of two Javanese nobles. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s posthumous magnum opus on Malayo-Polynesian languages, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (1836-39), used this material as the footstone for a historical-comparative grammar, often approvingly citing Gericke’s Javanese primer and grammar. The same is true for the equally massive, unpublished Kawi-Javanese dictionary by his secretary, Eduard Buschmann.

This philologization – also of living languages like Malay and Javanese, in which Raffles and his deputy John Crawfurd collected hundreds of manuscripts – formed the background for Gericke’s and Van der Tuuk’s work on Javanese and Balinese, and especially their dictionaries. What they sought to do was not only to study the lexicon but also to actively purify the language by singling out the Kawi elements. Gericke, who regarded Surakarta Javanese as the uniform standard and other varieties not merely as dialects but as a deformed ‘patois’, sought to cultivate the Kawi element and increase the understanding of it; at the Javanese Institute he hosted fully staged wayang performances. Van der Tuuk, conversely, sought to promote the study and use of Balinese for its own sake, without the pedantic use of half-understood Kawi expressions:

Some Balinese, especially the learned, despise Balinese literature, saying of this or that Balinese writ anjar (it’s new), which means as much as not worth reading. This is also why one searches in vain for useful Balinese texts, because all that is written is full of Kawi words, some of which rendered opaque by excess display of learning. The commentaries to Kawi poems cannot be understood by anyone who does not practice Kawi, for the desire to look learned makes the interpreter use words which are even harder to understand than those they are meant to explain. Here Byron’s quip applies: I wish he had explained his explanation.

A complicating factor for Gericke, especially in Bible translation, was that the main division in Javanese (and in Balinese) is not between ‘elite’ and ‘common’ sociolects but between a ‘top-down’ register used towards people junior in age or rank (ngoko), and a more ornate and periphrastic ‘bottom-up’ register used to address superiors and elders (kromo). This prevades every aspect of the language, with parallel words for nearly everything. Gericke set out to translate the Bible in kromo which was more humble and dignified but changed his mind at a late stage in the translation process because ngoko was more clear and succinct and because the humble register did not convey enough authority. In passages with shifts in speaker perspective, he was dragged into a game of language pingpong:

A small start that I have made with the translations of the Psalms convinces me of the difficulties. […] For example, the second Psalm has seven changes of speaker, which the language must adapt to.

Verse 1 and 2, the Poet speaks Kromo; Verse 3, the enemies of the King upon Zion, as rebels, speak Ngoko; Verse 4 and 5, the Poet again speaks Kromo; Verse 6, God himself speaks Ngoko, differing from that of the rebels; first half of Verse 7, the Anointed speaks Kromo; the other half of the seventh to the end of the ninth verse, containing the words of the Lord to his Anointed One, are Ngoko again; in the final three verses, the Poet speaks Kromo in his admonition to the rebels.

If one sought to use one and the same language in the entire Psalm, no Javanese would understand it. The difference between Kromo and Ngoko is often as big as between Dutch and Polish.

Note that Psalms 2:8 is where God says, in one of the most colonial passages in the Bible, “Ask of Me, and I will give You / The nations for Your inheritance / And the ends of the Earth for Your possession”.

 

Legacies

Gericke was repatriated in 1857 in what his physician described as “a general state of debility”, and though he seemed to have recovered somewhat back in Europe, he died during a family visit in Düsseldorf towards the end of that year. His Javanese Bible translation, for all its philological merits, did not become the standard translation: it lost out eventually against a more accessible rival version made by the disgruntled missionary Pieter Jansz and published by the BFBS. Van der Tuuk’s Toba Batak Bible also did not establish a lasting standard, because the language changed too much through colonisation and evangelisation. This was as he had predicted, arguing that the Biblical register had to develop in religious practice; accordingly, his work was later revised and used as a matrix by Rhenish missionaries whom he had trained. Van der Tuuk spent his last two decades on Bali, increasingly isolated from Dutch colonial society, working on his four-volume Kawi-Balinese-Dutch dictionary that appeared posthumously. On his death the notary listed among his possessions nearly fl. 140.000 in bonds and assets, the richest manuscript collection in Indonesia, some pots and pans, two donkeys, a dozen chickens, and a hut valued at ten guilders.

Language and the Missionary World Map: Platt’s and Radley’s histories of the BFBS

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Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by BFBS staff, written at roughly the same time; they cover much the same topics, figures, and languages and do not express notably strong or divergent views. What is clearer is why they were never published. Both manuscripts are very lengthy compilations of excerpts, transcripts, summaries, and in the case of the largest manuscript, of literal cutting and pasting from printed BFBS reports. All that material is arranged by language, with a chapter for each language into which the Bible was translated before or during that period, and no attempt at overarching narrative or analysis.

The biggest of the two manuscripts – in 15 volumes and envelopes of some 200 quarto pages each – was compiled by Thomas Pell Platt, the BFBS librarian between 1822-1831 and editor of its Greek, Amharic, and Ethiopic (Geez) versions. By far the largest chapter, filling two half-volumes, is taken up by the Serampore Mission. Serampore was a Danish colony near Calcutta, where a trio of Baptist missionaries churned out the unlikely number of 34 translations between 1800-1837 (i.e. in part before the BFBS was founded). What makes the chapter so large is also that it is largely a collage of the successive printed reports of the Serampore Brethren – reports that are otherwise hard to find even in Cambridge University Library. The same goes for Platt’s chapter about Sinhalese (the main language of Sri Lanka), where disagreements between missionaries turned into a veritable translation war. This recycling process makes Platt’s history a valuable historical source even despite its lack of originality.

Comparative vocabulary from Radley’s History of the BFBS

The other manuscript, though also filling 15 octavo notebooks, is considerably more condensed, enough so to fit into a single archive box. Its author is listed as John Radley, about whom less is known. Still the linguistic information is generally much richer than in Platt’s larger volumes: Radley provides comparative vocabularies and samples of alphabets as well as sketch language maps of Sulawesi and the upper Ganges region. More than Platt, he is inclined to cite and draw his information from recent non-missionary sources; his focus is on the missionary frontier in South/East Asia, whereas half of Platt’s history is devoted to larger and smaller European languages. Accordingly, Radley mixes missionary history with late enlightenment ethnography, taken from the works of British scholar-administrators in India and Indonesia (Colebrooke, Marsden, Raffles, Crawfurd).

What both manuscripts show us is how Bible translation resulted in a linguistic world map. Though written by philologically versed authors, neither was intended as a language encycylopaedia; but they contribute as least as much to our understanding of linguistic dynamics as of missionary history, and with its collection of linguistic ‘specimens’, Radley’s history leans towards a missionary Mithridates. The sheer multilingual scope and – sometimes misguided – optimism of the more industrious translators is staggering. In March 1810, the linguistic prodigy John Leyden promised to deliver gospels in “Siamese, Macassar, Bugis, Afghan or Pushtoo, Rakheng, Moldivian & Jaghatai” (accordingly grouped into one chapter in Platt’s history, although they belong to different regions and language families). With the aid of an unspecified number of “persons who assist Leyden in his literary researches” he estimated that “a year and a half might be sufficient for completing the Afghan, Jaghatai, and Siamese versions, and most probably the Bugis and Macasar” – and true enough, before his untimely death on Java 17 months later, he had pulled off complete gospels in Maldivian, Mark and Matthew in Pashtu, and Mark in Balochi, Makassarese, and Bugis, the latter two delayed by illness of his interpreter.

Leyden’s list of translations, from Platt’s History

Sometimes that optimism was sheer naïveté. Joshua Marshman, one of the Serampore trio of translators, cheerfully announced that he was first translating Confucius with the aid of the Chinese Armenian Joannes Lassar (Hovhannes Ghazarian) and an unnamed ‘Chinese assistant’, and then using the knowledge of Chinese thus acquired in translating the Bible. For all his insistence on method and autopsy, he never set foot in China; it is unsurprising that Chinese converts were rather won by other versions, like that of Karl Gützlaff and Robert Morrison (a work that inadvertently inspired the Taiping Rebellion, a mid-century syncretic millenarian movement that left 10-20 million Chinese dead). William Carey’s Marathi version fell flat for the plain reason that his munshi spoke ‘corrupt’ or nonstandard Marathi. But even Carey’s Sanskrit Bible, though more of a status object than a practical tool for proselytization, had its uses as a matrix for other translations.

 

Triangulation and Translation War

The story of Sinhalese, narrated in detail by both Platt and Radley, is illustrative in this regard, and in other ways. A first translation had been made in the early 18th century by the Dutch clergyman Willem Konijn, which was judged too plain as well as “unintelligible, formed according to the Dutch idiom, and not according to the Cingalese” by the Wesleyan missionaries after the British annexation of the colony. A colonial administrator with a passion for languages, William Tolfrey, undertook a new version with the aid of the converted Buddhist priest Abraham de Thomas and other (ex-)Buddhist clerics. To ensure that the new version was less foreign and more up to Sinhalese literary standards, a parallel version was made in Pali, the holy language of Theravada Buddhism:

To judge of the extent & appreciate the merit of Mr Tolfrey’s labours, it ought to be stated, that he carried forward the Cingalese translation in connexion with a second translation of Dr Carey’s version of the Sanscrit version into Pali; judging it expedient to render every verse into the Pali before it could be revised with effect in the Cingalese. The old Cingalese text was then revisited – it was afterwards compared with the Pali, & also with the excellent Tamul translation of Fabricius; in which the form of expression is so much alike, as to run easily from the Pali into the Cingalese: – but all with continual reference to the original Greek, & our own English version. The Pali though hereafter a work of great utility, only served at present to give precision & clearness to the Cingalese version.

That is from Radley’s History, notebook VI. More detail on the translation process is provided in Platt’s chapter on Pali:

The Pali translation is conducted in this manner. Mr Tolfrey reads from the text of Dr Carey’s Sanskrit Testament a certain number of verses to Don Abraham de Thomas, who writes the whole passage in Pali, as nearly as the idiom of that kindred language will admit. They afterward read over the Pali together, compare it verse by verse with the Sanskrit, and make any correction which in their judgement may be necessary. The Bengalee version is also often consulted in difficult passages, when the Sanskrit phrases are not easily expressed in Pali.

Moreover, their Pali version was used as a matrix by “two learned priests of Matura, Karratote Unnanse, and Bowila Unnanse […] who are both ignorant of English, and totally unacquainted with the Scriptures” for translating several chapters into common Sinhalese, so that it would be “perfectly intelligible to the natives, and free from all improper phrases or expressions borrowed from the English or Dutch languages”. Tolfrey sadly died in early 1817, with half the work done; fortunately for the BFBS, a committee of four missionaries who had been taught by Tolfrey stepped in to set forth his translation, following his ‘style &c.’ as closely as possible, and completed it by 1823.

That was not the end of the story. If Konijn’s version had been too plain, the new version was now criticized for being too difficult for ordinary Sinhalese, who needed a glossary. A remark in the BFBS reports that “The Natives of Ceylon were under the dominion of Europeans for two hundred and fifty years before their conquerors gave them any part of the word of God” provoked an angry letter from the Dutch Bible Society. CMS missionary Samuel Lambrick and three of his brethren protested against the new version because the Word should be for the poor, and because the new version used concepts and honorifics that were Buddhist in origin, thus importing heathenism into the holy writ. The local Bible Society invited Lambrick to provide his own version of six chapters of Matthew, which were not met with approval, after which he ended up publishing a simplified Sinhalese Book of Common Prayer and a Sinhalese Grammar at the Church Mission Press.

 

Time, Souls, and Money

There is no direct correlation between the time and effort involved in these translations and their impact. Although the Ceylon mission proudly claimed to have 10,000 native children in mission schools by the 1820s, with enough demand for 50,000 if there had been enough missionary teachers, Buddhism is still by far the majority religion on Sri Lanka, and most Sri Lankan Christians nowadays are Catholics. The first Javanese translation (1829), by the Baptist missionary Gottlob Brückner, though completed in the early 1820s, was held up by technical difficulties and the Java War (1825-30), and finally printed at Serampore, only to blocked by Dutch colonial authorities who wanted to avoid causing new unrests. The Dutch Bible Society’s own version was two more decades in the making, only to be eclipsed later by a less philological BFBS rival version. On the whole, missionary efforts were much more effective where they sought to replace Indigenous religions, like in Oceania, than when they were up against other ‘world religions’ with literary canons like Hinduism, Buddhism, and especially Islam. Inspired by the success of the LMS mission on Tahiti, and given the great similarities between Polynesian languages, the BFBS sought to save time and effort by using Tahitian as a lingua franca for other parts of Polynesia, but this turned out to be harder than expected.

The Gospels in Amharic, tr. Abu Rumi, ed. Thomas Pell Platt, 1824

A case in which Platt was personally involved as an editor, although he does not mention his own role, was Amharic. In 1820 there were painstaking negotiations (mediated through the French Orientalist mogul Sylvestre de Sacy and the British consul in Cairo) with the ex-priest and dragoman Jean-Louis Asselin de Cherville who wanted to sell a manuscript of a complete Amharic Bible translation for £ 1500. The BFBS offered only £ 750, which was already more than its standard fee of £ 500, in spite of doubts about a translation made by one man and not directly from Greek and Hebrew. In fact it had not been made by Asselin but by the Ethiopian priest Abu Rumi who lived with him in Cairo; in Ethiopia, Amharic was traditionally the language of the court whereas Geez was the language of the Bible. Eventually, Asselin and the BFBS agreed upon £ 1250, and the 9539-page manuscript was inspected by its indefatigable philological factotum, Professor Samuel Lee. (Apart from the details about the negotiations, the story can be read at greater length in William Jowett’s Christian Researches in the Mediterranean (1822), 197-204.) But preparing the manuscript for print took the BFBS nearly a quarter of a century: Gospels in 1824, the New Testament in 1828, and the whole Bible in 1844. Platt does not tell anything about the twenty-four-year editing process, but one can easily imagine him wearily looking up to the skies.

Blubber for Bibles

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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 

The 1940 BFBS Conference on African Languages

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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

  1. The language of your district.
  2. Boundaries of the language area.
  3. (a) Number who speak the language.
    (b) Number of Christians.
  4. What progress has been made since 1930
    (a) in the number of Christians?
    (b) in the literacy of the tribe?
  5. Is the language known to other tribes?
  6. 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:

  1. 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.

Ludwig Adzaklo: A long overlooked indigenous Ewe Bible translator of the Bremen Mission in German Togoland

michael.wandusim all, Research Archives , ,

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