Challenges

“Working across language boundaries can be tricky! While the consultants on the trip had experience primarily in American Sign Language and Kenyan Sign Language, only two of the Deaf Tanzanian translators could communicate in a sign language other than Tanzanian Sign. Communicating was quite an interesting challenge, yet somehow it came together. The first day, we hired two interpreters-one to translate Tanzanian Sign Language into spoken Swahili, and then another to interpret the Swahili into spoken English! This didn't work as well as we had hoped, so we decided to work with one interpreter and the Tanzanian team leader who could translate from Tanzanian Sign Language to Kenyan Sign Language (which four of the eight of us could communicate in). Despite the challenges, we were able to work it out and had fun in the process.

During comprehension checking of the story of Jesus' trial, a translation consultant discovered there are three different signs that mean ‘hard/difficult’ The translator was trying to express the inner turmoil of Peter when he denies Jesus, and the Deaf who watched the translation were trying to help. The first sign means ‘difficult’ like hard soil that is difficult to dig into. The second meant ‘difficult’ as in a problem is difficult. But the third one means ‘difficult’ as in something is hard to handle emotionally. The translator had used one of the previous two, but it was the third that was determined to be the best fit.

We ran into a challenge in the translation of Jairus' daughter being raised from the dead from Mark chapter 5. Half of the deaf participants were adamant that the girl was not dead, while the other half insisted she was! After all, in verse 39, Jesus says, ‘She is only asleep.’ If she was dead, half argued, then Jesus was a liar. The lead translation consultant stepped in to clear up the confusion. Using the story of Lazarus' as a second example of Jesus referring to a dead person as being asleep, he explained that death doesn't have the same meaning to Jesus as it does to us. He knew that God has the power to raise people from the dead, where we tend to view death as final. Death is not final to God. If He wanted to raise someone from the dead, He gave Jesus the power to do it. It does not matter how much time passes, and is as if the person is but sleeping.

During a Tanzania community checking trip, one of the translation consultants noted several issues that seemed to arise over and over. One such struggle was temporal discontinuity. Sign languages deal with past, present, and future time span in various ways. In one story, the team struggled to find out how a narrator could clearly tell a past tense story of a prophet who prophesied about events in the future, even more future than when the narrator is speaking. It can be tricky to sort out what exactly is happening when!

Another issue is that of spatial placement, particularly when you have multiple characters doing multiple things at once. In all the description and action, you can easily lose track of who is doing what action. When communicating a story in person, you have more context and the ability to ask clarification questions or additional information. But when the translation is fixed video on a DVD, the character placement, actions, and events have to be made clear so there is no confusion amongst viewers.

An example of these struggles is in the story of Jairus' daughter and the woman with the issue of blood. The story begins with Jesus accompanying Jairus to heal his daughter, then the plot of the bleeding woman is woven in. It is often difficult to have one on-going story with lots of action while trying to trace two subplots. However, the Tanzanian translation team did a good job on this passage and most people understood the story.