The Difficulty of Translation
Bible translators throughout the ages have often found it difficult to translate the scriptures literally into languages because ethinic and cultural differences often combine to produce entirely different meanings. That concept shouldn’t be hard to understand. In 1960, when General Motors began their marketing efforts for one of their new compact cars being exported into Mexico and South America, they had an immediate problem with the car’s name. “Nova,” when broken up sylabically in Spanish sounded like “no va,” or the car “won’t go!”

In her book Mission Possible, Marilyn Laszlo gives an example of one of these situations that happened in 1976 when she was a Wycliffe translator in Papua New Guinea. She had struggled for years with the Sepik Iwam language trying to find a word that meant “soul.” One night after several days of struggling once again to explain the concept of soul to the Sepik Iwam group she was working with, she went to bed in tears. She cried and let God know she was ready to give up. But she heard God whisper, “Marilyn, who do you think created this language. I did. I love this language, and I love these precious people. The words are there. Trust me.”

Days later one of the young Sepik Iwam boys and his dog ran into the jungle chasing a wild boar. The boar got away, but not before the boy, Ronnie, got lost. He ended up spending the night in the jungle, wide awake, holding his dog with his back to a tree and trembling with fear that a python would eat him.

“I was terrified that I would lose my name,” Ronnie said when he was finally found. When one of the elders was pressed about what the young boy meant, he said, “When you lose your name, it is over, finished!”

Since she knew the words for death and dying, Marilyn realized the concept young Ronnie was trying to convey was different. After consulting with the translation team that had been helping her in her struggle to find the word for soul for nearly seven years, they agreed that “name” was indeed the perfect Sepik Iwam word for “soul!” It also provided a second witness. Apparently the Sepik Iwam elders remained unsure of the concept of their names being written in the “Book of Life.” What if someone who didn’t understand their language had “misspelled” their name when entering it? Would God know them, or would they be lost forever? For the first time, they realized that God knew each of them personally, even the correct spelling of their names—and they were overwhelmed.

Metanoia represents a similar problem for us. Consider this—not only do we have a problem with our translation from the Greek to English, but what if the original Greek left something to be desired from words of the language most likely spoken by John and Jesus—Hebrew or Aramic? Translators often look for other words in a language that might have similar meanings to illustrate a concept. The closest word we have in English to the meaning of the Greek word metanoia—as used in the original scriptural text—is “metamorphosis,” or the life cycle of change as seen when the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. If we look closely at the concept of metamorphosis we might find insight into the process of metanoia, and the importance of repentance in our lives.