Who's Telling the Story?

When translating the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles into Enga, we must answer the question of who is telling the story. For example, who is really telling the story in the Gospel of Matthew? Is the story being told by us, the translators? Is the story being told by Matthew himself? Or is the story being told by an omniscient narrator? While these are interesting questions for speakers of any language to ponder, the answers to these questions actually change the translation in Enga. This is because the Enga language requires the use of evidential suffixes by which the speakers indicates the source of his or her information. In other words, when a person tells a story in Enga, the listeners know, based on the suffixes that person uses, whether that person directly witnessed the events or not.

Consequently, if we the translators are the ones telling the story in the Gospel of Matthew, then we need to use suffixes to indicate that we did not directly witness the events. Stylistically, however, this does not sound good in Enga, particularly over the course of a long narrative. Furthermore, it is a stretch to think that we the translators are the ones telling the story. We are not telling the story; we are simply translating it into the Enga language. On the other hand, if Matthew is the one telling the story in the Gospel of Matthew, then we the translators have to try to determine what events Matthew directly witnessed himself and what he only learned about from others. Sometimes this would be an easy determination to make, but at other times the best we could hope to achieve is an educated guess as to whether or not Matthew was present at a particular event. However, if the story is being told by an omniscient narrator, then the story can be told from the perspective of a direct eyewitness, and there is no need to try to figure out whether or not Matthew was present at each event.

Is Matthew the one telling the story?

After giving consideration to these three different possibilities, the Enga translation team ultimately decided to tell the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. This allows us to communicate the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as compilations of eyewitness accounts, which is ultimately what they are, while also employing a beautiful translation style that comes across as authoritative.

Once we reached this decision, however, it required us to go back through the New Testament to make sure that the suffixes we are using align with the idea that the story is being told by an omniscient narrator. That is just one of a long checklist of items that the team and I are reviewing as we make our final adjustments to the New Testament. Thankfully, we should finish all of our major adjustments this week. We will then spend the next three months reading through each of the books one last time, making any final adjustments before we begin recording the Enga New Testament on August 2. Please pray for us as we finish up the translation in the next three months to prepare for recording. And, as always, thank you for partnering with us in this ministry. We could not do it without you!