Abstract
Probably few people nowadays are aware of a chapter in the history of the Good News Bible (GNB) that eventually led nowhere. The GNB had been published in both US and British editions from its early days, and these two dialectal variants were widely perceived as meeting the needs of the vast majority of potential readers. However, 1988 was the year to commemorate the bicentenary of British settlement in Australia, and the Australian Bible Society decided it would like to join in the celebrations by producing an Australian dialect edition of GNB to mark the occasion. This idea was greeted by the GNB copyright holder, the American Bible Society, with a disapproval perhaps amounting to horror. The fear apparently was that such an edition might spark off a demand for numerous other dialect editions such as Indian English, Caribbean English, South African English, and so on. As a compromise, it was proposed to investigate the possibility of producing an edition that would unify the existing American and British editions with the Australian edition that was already under preparation. This work was to be done quietly by a team of three people, each representing one of the dialects involved.
As a result of these back-room negotiations about which most UBS staff knew nothing, on June 20, 1985, during the Asia-Pacific Regional Translation Consultation in Hong Kong, I was astonished to be invited by Phil Stine, the world Translation Services Coordinator, at a meal in a pizzeria, to be the British English member of the triumvirate. The American member was to be Harold Scanlin and the Australian Euan Fry, the man who had already done a lot of the work on the potential Australian dialect edition. That meal was also memorable as the occasion on which Phil Stine discovered a large metal bolt under the cheese on his pizza!
The work of trying to unify the existing US and UK editions of GNB with the provisional Australian edition was to be done mainly by individual study and correspondence among the three of us, with occasional meetings when opportunity offered. I was allowed to spend up to a third of my working time on the project, which did indeed prove an intriguing and challenging task. The three of us had our first meeting in Bangkok on February 3–6, 1986, when we were there for other reasons, and a second meeting in London on September 22–25, 1986. We managed to cover quite a few of the books of both the Old Testament and the New, encountering many interesting questions in the process. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have preserved our interim correspondence, and I do not know whether any copies have survived in the USA or Australia. My memory is that we were able to reach a consensus on many points, while others were put aside for face-to-face discussion. It was not usually too difficult to come to mutual agreement on such matters as figures of speech or syntax. For instance Euan insisted that the word “whom,” which remained acceptable in the US and UK editions, was virtually obsolete in Australian English, so sentences where it occurred needed to be restructured to avoid it.
The real sticking points were on vocabulary. These I believe had been the main reason for the original decision to have different American and British editions of GNB. The classic example is the difference between “rooster” in US editions and “cock” in UK editions. It was not theological terms that presented us with major problems, but very ordinary words, two of which I remember clearly. One was “brook,” which was acceptable in both American and British English, but which Euan declared to sound archaically British to modern Australians. He felt that “stream” was also unnatural. In Australian English such biblical watercourses as Cherith and Kidron would be called “creeks.” For me, and I assume for the majority of British English speakers, a “creek” is a tidal inlet of the sea, and the coast of the Holy Land does not offer such inlets, so “creek” would have been seriously misleading for British readers. Indeed, I had previously been rather puzzled when travelling in Queensland to cross bridges over watercourses that were far from tidal and to see them labelled “creeks” on signboards. We were unable to find any term that satisfied all three of us.
The other common word that defeated us was “field.” In agricultural contexts this was again acceptable both to Harold and to me, with the meaning of an arable plot of land, but Euan assured us that the only equivalent acceptable in modern Australian English was “paddock.” In British English, a “paddock” is a place where horses are exercised and has nothing to do with agriculture, and if I remember aright, Harold agreed. Therefore “paddock” would not convey the intended meaning at all to our audiences. Again, we never found any satisfactory compromise. In what proved to be our final meeting in London, we were reluctantly coming to the conclusion that despite all the effort we had put into the task, an edition that would be acceptable to all of us was simply not possible. While we were still in session, we received a message that the powers that be had decreed that our project had been cancelled. Whether this was for financial or political reasons, I don’t think we were ever told.
The eventual outcome was that the Australian dialect edition of GNB was published anyway in time for the 1988 bicentennial without the permission of the ABS copyright holder. However, when anonymous evaluators at ABS examined the Australian edition, they recognized that it was a careful and responsible piece of work, and rather reluctantly decided to acquiesce in its publication and take no further action.