Learning The Languages Of Asia

While translators in Africa struggled to develop written forms for spoken languages, on the other side of the world, other translators encounter a much different obstacle-translating into languages that already had complex written scripts. Such was the challenge facing those who translated the Bible into the language of Asia.

At the beginning of the 19th century, William Carey and Joshua Marshman went to India and mastered many of its written languages. With the help of William Ward, a printer, they produced translations of at least portions of the Bible in nearly 40 languages. Regarding William Carey, author J. Herbert Kane explains: "He invented a beautiful free-flowing colloquial style [of the Bengali language] that replaced the old classical form, thereby making it more intelligible and attractive to modern readers."

Adoniram Judson, born and raised in the United States, traveled to Burma, and in 1817 he began to translate the Bible into Burmese. Describing the difficulty of mastering an Oriental language to the degree necessary to translate the Bible, he wrote: 'When we take up a language spoken by a people on the other side of the earth, whose thoughts run in channels diverse from ours, and whose codes of expression are consequently all new, and he letters and words all totally destitute of the least resemblance to any language we have ever met with; when we have no dictionary or interpreter and must get something of the language before we can avail ourselves of the assistance of a native teacher-that means work!'

In Judson's case, it meant some 18 years of painstaking work. the final portion of the Burmese Bible was printed in 1835. His stay in Burma,however. cost him dearly. While he was working on the translation, he was accused of spying and hence spent nearly two years in a mosquito- invested jail. Not long after his release, his wife and young daughter died of fever.

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A Book For All People, 1997