Proclaimer Blog
Why learning to be translated could be good for your preaching
Here in India at the moment and our Cornhill team has done some teaching in both Hindi and Nepali. It's not as easy as you might think (we're talking phrase by phrase translation, rather than simultaneous translation). They've done a good job though. Here are some of my translating tips I gave the team before we started:
- speak in whole but short sentences. I call this Readers Digest preaching. Long sentences, half thoughts, subordinate clauses – these are all hard to translate. You make the translation work much better if you use short, full sentences, even if it doesn't sound like the best BBC news.
- speak with simple words. Both Nepali and Hindi have smaller vocabularies than English. Our rhetoric style makes much of synonyms. That rarely works in translation.
- speak slowly. The translation itself introduces a slower pace to your speaking. But don't be so excited about the next phrase that you leave the last one still being translated.
It strikes me that all these tips have relevance to simple preaching in our mother tongue. It's no bad thing to keep sentences simple and short. Long subordinate clauses that look good on paper are much harder to digest when listened to. It's commendable to avoid complex language. It's good to introduce pause to counter pace. Of course, there is an art to rhetoric in our own language but I've heard enough UK speakers who ought to learn to listen to these tips carefully. They would be a nightmare to translate and that may well mean that they hard to listen to, even in their mother tongue.