The Revision of the Vietnamese Bible

1
The Revision of the Vietnamese Bible

• Cetra 2005
• Pham Thi Xuan Huong
• (Lisa)
• Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship
• American Bible Society

2
A Brief Overview of the Church in Vietnam

• The Catholic Church

• 1533 The First Missionary to Vietnam, the Jesuit
  priest Inigo
• 1584 Dominican and Jesuit priests

3
The Catholic Church

• 1624 Alexandre De Rhodes, Jesuit priest, worked
  with several other Jesuits and a Vietnamese
  teenager to romanize the Vietnamese alphabet
• Catechism, prayer and liturgy books were
  translated into Vietnamese

4
The Catholic Church

• The Church grew to around 358,000 believers in
  half a century.
• Translation seemed to have played a role in
  church growth
• 1802-1858 Vietnamese kings persecuted the church
  (some Spanish Dominican priests and a Spanish
  Bishop were executed together with many
  Vietnamese believers).

5
The Catholic Church

• Spain and France decided to punish Vietnam
• 1867 The Southern part of Vietnam (from Saigon
  to the southern point of Ca Mau) came under the
  Protectorat of France
• 1872 The Catholic church published the Gospels
  and the Epistles
• 1913-16 The OT and the Deuterocanonical books
  were published

6
The Evangelical Church (Tin Lanh)

• 1911 The First Missionaries from the Christian
  And Missionary Alliance
• 1915 Rev. and Mrs William Charles Cadman (they
  stayed and served in Vietnam, despite
  emprisonment by the Japanese, until they were
  called home, Mrs Cadman in 1946, and Rev. Cadman
  in 1948)

7
The Evangelical Church

• 1925/26 The Vietnamese Bible was published (the
  Cadmans, with the help of the Olsens, the
  Stebbins, and two Vietnamese writers Phan Khoi
  and Tran van Dong, had been working on this
  translation for over 10 years).
• The church grew to over 100,000 believers from
  1925 to 1975.

8
The Evangelical Church

• The Cadman Bible became the substitution for
  the source text (according to the definition of
  Dirk Delabastita).
• In fact, Vietnamese believers at large were not
  aware of any source text. To us, the Vietnamese
  Bible is the Word of God.
• Through this Bible, we listen to God, we pray to
  God, we get comfort and encouragement from God.
  

9
Why Do We Need to Revise the Bible?

• No Translation of the Scriptures should ever be
  regarded as final, for the Bible must speak to
  every succeeding generation with undiminished
  clarity (A Guide for Translators and Revisers of
  the Holy Scriptures, ABS, 1961).

10
Why Do We Need to Revise the Bible?

• Language evolves words and phrases become
  archaic and no longer intelligible (the Cadman
  Bible has words and particles that are no longer
  used in everyday speech or in the books and
  newspapers currently published).
• New findings in Biblical scholarship

11
The Bible in South Vietnam

• The Catholic church and the Tin Lanh church have
  their own respective Bibles.
• Around 1973, representatives of the United Bible
  Societies from the Asia-Pacific region met with
  church leaders from both churches in South
  Vietnam to discuss the possibility of a new
  interconfessional common language translation.

12
The Bible in South Vietnam

• Both churches accepted the offer and selected
  teams of translators.
• The UBS consultants held a workshop to train the
  translators.
• The project was put on hold when the Communists
  took over South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

13
The Work Goes On

• Those from the Tin Lanh church who were involved
  in the translation workshop were scattered in the
  aftermath of the war (1975).
• Those from the Catholic church were able to
  regroup and continued to work in Ho Chi Minh city
  (formerly, Saigon) on a new translation.
• The whole Bible was completed and published with
  the help of UBS in 1998. This is a formal
  equivalence translation.

14
The Work Goes on

• Vietnam being a democratic republic since 1975,
  there is no Bible society inside the country to
  help the Tin Lanh church (which has generally
  been loosely organized) produce a new
  translation.
• Around the early 1990s, there has been freer
  exchange between Vietnam and the outside world.

15
The Work Goes On

• Finally, UBS consultants were able to connect
  with some leaders in the Tin Lanh church who
  enlisted a team of translators.
• UBS consultants gave them a training workshop on
  translation.

16
The Work Goes On

• The initial project in 1973 of a common language
  translation became a project of Bible revision.
• The revision started around 1998, under the
  supervision of Dr. Phil Towner.
• The Revised New Testament was completed and
  dedicated on Easter of 2003.
• The revision of the Old Testament started around
  2000 and is still going on.

17
Norm for Bible Revision

• Acceptability

18
Tools used in Bible revision

• Paratext
• Source texts (Hebrew and Greek) are put alongside
  Bible versions from different countries for the
  translator to download what he needs

19
Tools used in Bible Revision

• Translators handbooks which are commentaries
  written by Translation Consultants who share
  their experience in the field and also give
  suggestions on how to translate particular
  difficult idioms.
• Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP)
  prepared by textual critics who give suggestions
  on choices between textual variants.
• Access to the vocabula databases of the Semantic
  Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew

20
Conclusion

• It is well known that the work of a translator
  is a difficult art. It implies the commitment to
  put in contact and to create a communication
  among histories, cultures and languages sometimes
  very far from one another in space and time. A
  good translation is based on three pillars that
  must simultaneously support the entire work.

21
Conclusion

• First there must be a deep knowledge of the
  original language and cultural world. Next, there
  must be a similar good familiarity with the
  language and the cultural context in and for
  which the text is translated.
• Lastly, to succeed in the whole work, there must
  be an adequate mastery of the contents and
  meanings of what is being translated.
• (Address of Pope John Paul II to the United Bible
  Societies and the Bible Society in Italy on
  Monday, 26 November 2001)