The Ever-Rolling Stream: How Time Subverts “Translation for” into “Journeying with”: Half a Century of Bible Translation in Urak Lawoi’

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

 Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

 Dies at the opening day.

        Isaac Watts

Isaac Watts’s hymn, “Oh God, our help in ages past,” like the ninetieth Psalm which it paraphrases, contrasts the ephemeral nature of human lives and societies with the eternity of God’s existence, and claims that security for temporally challenged beings is to be found only in the refuge of God’s presence. Bible translation is a task, or a vocation, which spans the gulf between the eternity of God’s word and the contingencies of time-bound human beings.

When David Hogan began linguistic and then Bible translation work among the Urak Lawoi’ of South Thailand, around 1966–1967, he could scarcely dream that one day a complete Bible would exist in this previously unrecognised and undescribed minority language, nor that most of it would have been translated by a paraplegic Urak Lawoi’ man with four years’ primary education, nor that it would still be in the consultant checking phase in 2018, half a century later, nor yet that it would be published in digital form for use on smart phones. He could not have predicted that a tsunami would change not only the people’s view of the sea, but their acceptance of the Bible message, nor that tourism and economic pressure would threaten their land tenure and their livelihood, and that, despite all the economic pressure, both they and their language would persist. Scope, agency, time span, geology, social setting, and medium have all undergone inconceivable shifts—but of these it is time which has been the agent which has exerted creative and innovative influence on all the others.

Hogan’s career up to the point he commenced working with the Urak Lawoi’ was varied, but his long-term goal had always been Bible translation. As a radio engineer he had helped establish missionary radio connections in Borneo before moving with his family to Thailand in 1958. Several years of Thai language study and work in Thai churches intervened. But back in Melbourne in 1951 he had taken an SIL course in field linguistics and later had been involved in language surveys in the North of Thailand. When a colleague pointed him to the economically-depressed, uneducated but linguistically unique fishing people on the southwest coast of Thailand, he found his niche and his calling.

In some ways, Hogan’s approach was typical of the missionary-linguist, modelled all over the world by Wycliffe/SIL. He was a keen observer and student, and did outstanding linguistic, orthographic, and ethnographic research, which he progressively published (Hogan 1972, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1999; Hogan and Pattemore 1988). In February 1971 he attended one of the early UBS month-long translation “institutes” in Pattaya, near Bangkok, taught by the likes of Gene Nida, Bill Smalley, and Barclay Newman. During the following years he began to focus specifically on Bible translation, leading to the first formal publication, Mark’s Gospel, in 1976. The Urak Lawoi’ were excluded from the main stream of Thai development, as subsistence fishing people with almost no education. If they were to hear the message of God’s love in Christ, it would have to be in their own hitherto undescribed language, and it would have to be translated for them. Although, in keeping with the SIL model, he always worked with indigenous “informants” or “translation helpers,” the intellectual work was his alone. With great foresight, he devised an orthography using Thai characters (not Latin ones, as many in North Thailand were doing at the same time), and with his wife Doreen produced literacy materials and attempted to use them to teach reading and writing. The translation work was independent but always submitted to consultant checking by UBS (or occasionally SIL) consultants. Over the decade of the 1980s, translated portions and selections from both Testaments were added to a growing loose-leaf folder informally dubbed “The Bible So Far.” These included selections from Matthew (1972), Genesis and Isaiah (1974), and all of Mark (1976, revised 1984), Ruth (1979), 1 John, Titus, and James (1982), Jonah (1983), Joshua (1986), Psalms (1987), Ephesians (ca. 1991), and a new edition of Mark (1992).

Notice there is no priority of New Testament over Old Testament in this list. In other ways, too, the project was anything but typical from the very beginning. The Hogans were not members of SIL, but Brethren missionaries. Their driving aim was never purely linguistic nor yet translational. They formed close relationships with the Urak Lawoi’ people and became involved in a wide range of what would now be called “holistic ministries.” Chief among these were the supply of basic medical care, help with occupational diversity, and encouragement and support for the people in availing themselves of the growing educational and social support systems of the Thai government. And they shared the good news of God’s love in Christ, such that, by the early 1980s, a small church began to grow.

While the Hogans’ life was intimately with the Urak Lawoi’, Bible translation remained a technical and intricate task performed for them. In a context of slow language death under the onslaught of the dominance of Thai, the emerging church was (and still is) one of the key centres of resistance and retention of the language. The need to provide at least a complete New Testament for them was clear. But David Hogan was running out of informants. His long-time helper, Mr. Wong, died in 1990, and his successor, Hanim, not long afterwards.

Computers had arrived in the project in 1984, and this was another technical aspect of the work that empowered the missionary translators in their work for the Urak Lawoi’, one that inevitably distanced the translation from the Urak Lawoi’ themselves, as it was inconceivable that they would be interested in computers or be able to use them.

Within months of the first computer purchase, my wife Raewyn and I arrived in Thailand, to assist her parents, the Hogans, in their work with the Urak Lawoi’. And so began our own journeying with the people. We became involved in both translation and literacy (Pattemore 1994; Pattemore and Hogan 1989; Pattemore and Pattemore 1995). At the very time that I was providing computer assistance to my father-in-law in his compilation of a dictionary for the Urak Lawoi’, I was approached by one of the leaders among the Christians with a notebook in which he had begun compiling his own Urak Lawoi’–Thai dictionary based on semantic domains. The result was our working with AhLin to publish a dictionary in two volumes which incorporated his work (Hardsaithong, Pattemore, and Hogan 1996).

In 1992, I happened to read a paper in the SIL journal Notes on Translation entitled “Who Does the Drafting?” (Culy 1992). ¹ The burden of the paper was that, contrary to the then-accepted practice in missionary-linguist projects, the owners of the language themselves should be the ones making the first draft of a translation. With the responsibility for ongoing translation moving to me, I immediately began to put this into practice.

The Urak Lawoi’ are divers, using compressed air to enable them to forage on the sea floor for extended periods of time. As a result, Caisson’s disease, or “the bends,” is an ongoing occupational hazard which in earlier years led to almost certain premature death. My language teacher had been a paraplegic as a result of the bends. He lived perhaps five years after his accident but died in 1987. In 1985 I had met another young bends victim who had become paraplegic. When I wanted to find someone to begin producing first drafts of biblical texts, Ethim Pramongkit was an obvious choice as he had no other occupation. I gave him a duplicated copy of the translation of the book of James and asked him to mark on it any changes he would like. His response was to present me with a notebook in which he had retranslated (and handwritten) the entire book. Even I could not have dreamed that nearly thirty years later he continues to work on his bed with his computer, using Paratext, communicating via Paratext, email, and Skype, and has almost single-handedly drafted the entire Old Testament, following on his completion of the work on the New Testament. But I get ahead of myself.

Journeying with the paraplegic bends victims among the Urak Lawoi’ has been one feature of the past thirty-plus years. It has involved raising money to purchase, modify, maintain, and replace motorized tricycles for up to six paraplegic men, including Ethim—not exactly a typical budget item for a standard Bible translation project. And one of the first measurable outcomes of Ethim’s involvement was the publication and launch in 1998 of the Urak Lawoi’ New Testament—a mere thirty years after it was begun, and just eight months before the death of David Hogan himself. The money raised in New Zealand and Australia for that publication so far exceeded the cost that we were able to purchase Ethim his first computer at that time, and within a few years he was using Paratext. No innovation we could throw at him seemed to faze this non-primary graduate, who is now on Paratext 8.0. As I write, I have just been speaking with him on Skype.

On Boxing Day 2004 a deadly tsunami swept the Indian Ocean. Urak Lawoi’ villages received a glancing blow but were spared loss of life. Most of their boats were destroyed and Ethim’s village was evacuated, with many houses, including his own, badly damaged. Ethim’s computer was submerged but the data were able to be extracted off the hard drive. This event changed many things and was another situation in which we found ourselves journeying with the Urak Lawoi’, helping to rebuild houses, financing new boats, and visiting other communities of Urak Lawoi’ down the coast who had been similarly affected. Thailand Bible Society used this as an opportunity for holistic ministry to these people, partnering with several churches to provide aid and support. The church grew and there was an unexpected surge in demand for the Urak Lawoi’ New Testament. The sudden prominence gained by the Urak Lawoi’ in Thailand as tsunami survivors had another side effect: Thailand Bible Society adopted the Urak Lawoi’ project as their own, and helped raise funds for literacy and ongoing translation work on the Old Testament.

The village where the Hogans first contacted the Urak Lawoi’ was at the end of a long, narrow, dirt road, a destination few ever visited. Today a four-lane highway leads past the village, cramping it on one side, and the surrounding land is full of hotels, nightclubs, prawn farms, restaurants, shops, and all the detritus of a modern tourist-based society. Consequently, the value of the land has soared. The Urak Lawoi’ never had official titles to the land they lived on, and increasingly over recent years they have been threatened with eviction (to where?) and loss of land for houses, boat and fish trap maintenance, and religious rites. Their water has been polluted, and the village is worse than many Bangkok slums in terms of the quality of life it can offer. The latest challenge has come from the ironically named Barron Corporation, funded by big banks with high-ranking military officials behind them. But this time the Urak Lawoi’ have chosen to stand up and fight for their rights, supported by a Thai Human Rights organisation. Christian leaders have been among those at the forefront of the fight, and are frequently in court challenging a recent decision that went against them or having one that went in their favour challenged. Who is journeying with whom in this conflict? Certainly, we can only journey from afar, providing encouragement and support wherever possible. But the Christian community has been journeying with the whole village and helping to provide principled leadership. What impact has this had on Bible translation? Apart from stealing a lot of focus of attention, there has been one very interesting development. Through this process the Urak Lawoi’ have increasingly turned to smart-phone technology, to record what happens on the ground, to propagate information through social media, and to communicate with each other. This has had a positive spin-off for communications between boats at sea and their home base, and also between a small village in South Thailand and New Zealand. And as result, the Urak Lawoi’ Bible, when it finishes the checking process, will probably be published digitally instead of on paper.

The passage of time has had a significant effect on educational opportunities and language preference, which in turn have influenced the purpose and medium of Bible translation. By the 1990s it was almost universal that young Urak Lawoi’ would persist in the local Thai schools, at least through to the end of primary schooling, with an increasing number heading to secondary school as well, even though this required significant travel. This meant that a large number of them were proficient in reading and writing Thai, but also that they spoke Thai fluently—both the southern dialect and the national language of Central Thai. By 1991 we needed to make a significant adjustment to the orthography of Urak Lawoi’.

When David Hogan devised the orthography, he assumed that it would be the first language people learned to read. So, although he used the Thai script, sticking as close as possible to its rules, we found that some long/short vowel distinctions did not work as he assumed, once it became normal for people to have learned to read Thai first, and come to Urak Lawoi’ second. Language shift and language loss has been under way for a long time, but most young people preferentially use Thai. This shift has led to the increased importance of providing Scripture material in diglot format (Psalms and Proverbs 2011, Pentateuch 2019, Joshua–2 Samuel 2020, the rest of the OT narrative books in preparation), with the understanding that some younger Urak Lawoi’ will use the Thai text to help them understand the Urak Lawoi’ language, with which they are not very familiar even if they are motivated to preserve and use it. This shift also necessitated a change in literacy strategy. Raewyn established that, rather than primary literacy, what was needed was transitional literacy, which helped people bridge the gap from reading Thai to reading their own language—and began producing materials based on this.

How do we evaluate such an extended process? Had the translators concentrated entirely on Bible translation, to the exclusion of other concerns (holistic ministry, social support, church planting, family needs), there might have been an Urak Lawoi’ New Testament by, say, the late 1970s and a full Bible by the mid to late 1980s, following Bible Society guidelines. Would this have been a preferable outcome? Or would the products now be relegated to quaint, antiquarian curiosities on a few shelves (and in warehouses)? Having been so intimately involved with this people group over the whole of my career and the life of my family, it is extremely difficult to give an objective answer.

Anicia del Corro (2015) has documented two long-running projects in the Philippines: a Bible that took twenty-four years, and a New Testament that took thirty-five years. These are described against the background of an ideal project in the Philippines taking ten years for a whole Bible. Changes in the social situation of the speakers, language shift and language loss which went along with this, the dominance of local and national languages of wider communication, increase in bilingualism and multilingualism, and the consequent changes in language preference—all of these factors are present in the Urak Lawoi’ situation. When my wife and I first entered the world of the Urak Lawoi’ in 1984, parents were already bemoaning the fact that their children did not speak the language, and our observations confirmed that most in-group interactions among people younger than twenty-five or so took place in some variety of Thai. Yet, thirty-five years later, the language is not yet moribund, and centres of resistance to loss, like the churches, have seen younger people seek to recover the lost linguistic link to their past. So how should we judge del Corro’s call to ensure that whole Bibles are translated within ten years? That is not a rhetorical question but an open one.

From the other side, Phil Towner (2018) has eloquently argued that the current preoccupation with efficiency and the rapid generation of a product owes more to commercial and industrial models than biblical ones. Instead, he argues, the process involved in the translation, and the human relationships and social modalities which are nourished through the process, are just as valuable as the product, if not more so. At the risk of naive self-justification, I would suggest that the Urak Lawoi’ translation is one of Towner’s “lost causes,” and that the journey which we and the Urak Lawoi’ have engaged in together has been enriching on all sides. The church has grown and developed, and local leaders have matured and come to the forefront not only in the church context but in the wider issues of concern to the whole tribe. And the language itself has bobbed around on the surface of the inexorable currents of social change, but in the process will find its place in “the cloud” along with the great languages of the world.

I am not arguing, from this one example, that the industrial model of Bible translation, the piper’s tune to which we dance, is entirely misguided or wrong. But it does seem to draw its inspiration from the wrong domains. And my experience elsewhere, as in Papua New Guinea, leads me to believe that the importance of the human, communal, relational dimension of Bible translation is not unique to the Urak Lawoi’ case. Even John Stuart Mills’s brand of utilitarianism was predicated on human happiness, ² which seems a far cry from the mix of eschatologically driven pragmatism and fiscal efficiency to which we are urged to aspire today. The late Eugene Peterson’s Message translates John 1.14 this way:

The Word became flesh and blood,

 and moved into the neighbourhood.

We saw the glory with our own eyes,

 the one-of-a-kind glory,

 like Father, like Son,

Generous inside and out,

 true from start to finish.

Would that this were true of every incarnation of the written word and the processes that give it birth.

Isaac Watts’s hymn with which we began contains a verse that is rarely if ever sung:

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,

With all their lives and cares,

Are carried downwards by thy flood,

And lost in following years.

This sounds deeply pessimistic, but it is truer to the human world of the twenty-first century than Watts could have imagined. Tribes, languages, and social modalities come and go in the great flood-tide of human flourishing—yet in Watts’s theology (based on Psalm 90) there is nothing random about this. It is God’s flood which carries all before it. And the journey with fellow-travellers is more integral than any temporary destination on the way to the kingdom. ³