Yuli: rift valley, rice fields & mountains
I spent last week living in the town of Yuli. It’s situated on the plain in the beautiful rift valley in eastern Taiwan. I was a guest in the home of my co-worker Rev Manias (Chang Yu-fa) and his wife. Manias is the lead translator on the Bunun Bible translation team. I have had the joy of encouraging him and the Bunun team over the past five years.
A few months ago Manias finished his revision of the Bunun New Testament and Short Old Testament (published in 2000), plus his draft of all the remaining books and chapters in the OT. To date, the rest of the team has done a careful review of the whole OT, plus Matthew-Colossians. They hope to complete their NT review next month. Meanwhile, I have been helping Manias use various checking tools in Paratext, the Bible translation software we use that was developed by the United Bible Societies and Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Paul & Manias
Last week we continued to analyse how consistently Manias and the team have been translating key Hebrew and Greek biblical terms into Bunun. These terms occur frequently in eight broad semantic domains, such as: proper names, animals, plants, beings, objects and rituals. This visit we focused on Bunun renderings for various attributes, such as: faith, fear, love, sin, holy, unclean, grace, peace, kindness, life, wisdom, strength, truth, etc. We also clarified the distinction in Bunun between “God Most High” and “the LORD of Hosts”.
An example from the attributes domain. Bunun has at least three word groups for Hebrew ‘chesed’ (loyalty, lovingkindness). Depending on the context in the OT, Bunun translates this Hebrew word by changing the prefixes or suffixes based on these roots: daidaz, maupa or humis. For example, the Bunun root ‘daidaz’ occurs in the Bible as: daidaz, sinkadaidaz, sinsaudaidaz, madaidaz, makudaidaz, and mapakadaidaz—depending on the context in each verse. This is but one simple testimony to the beauty and richness of the Bunun language. Thankfully, Manias is an expert in Bunun! I support him in other ways. If this isn’t complicated enough, Manias and I do all of this kind of analysis by conversing and reading Mandarin-Chinese which has its own complexities and nuances!
I thank God for creating such a gifted Bunun Bible translator. Manias told me he was born into a poor Bunun home in 1939 during the last six years of imperial Japanese rule in Taiwan. His first language was one of the six Bunun dialects spoken in the high central mountains. He quickly learned how to speak Japanese too. His father did clerical work at the local Japanese police station, while his mother swept floors there. His parents recognized his intelligence from an early age and encouraged him to attend school and study hard. Top of his class through elementary school, he passed the entrance exam to the regional teacher’s college in Hualien. He started teaching when he was around 18 years old. Later he was able to go and attend an agricultural college in Japan, a rare opportunity for a young indigenous man from Taiwan. His classmates in Japan were surprised when they learned where he was from, because he didn’t speak with a Taiwanese accent. Another testimony to the way his parents raised him. Sadly, his father died of tuberculosis when Manias was around 13; his mom died of TB when he was in his early twenties.
In the 1920s a Truku woman named Chi-oang heard the Gospel in Japanese, believed in the Creator God revealed in Jesus Christ, and began to share the Good News clandestinely, not fearing the harsh Japanese laws of the day. Later she would become known as “the mother of indigenous churches” in Taiwan. The Gospel spread, again in Japanese, to Bunun villages through their contact with new Truku Christians. Manias told me it was the power of the written Word of God which changed the life of a local medicine woman in his Bunun village. She started to pray in Jesus’ name, became a Christian, then as she heard more and more Gospel stories, she would share them immediately with her Bunun neighbours. By God’s grace the Good News spread among Bunun people and whole villages came to faith in Christ.
Rev Hu Wen-tse
The Japanese left Taiwan in 1945. Then came new rulers and government from China. But what of the Gospel among emerging Christian indigenous peoples like the Bunun? While Taiwan’s official language was changing, Bunun people kept on speaking Bunun. Could they transmit the Good News of Jesus using their own language? The principal of Taiwan Theological College, Rev James Dickson thought so. After the war he organized PCT outreach to indigenous peoples who lived in the mountains. He encouraged a Taiwanese minister Rev Hu Wen-tse to consider cross-cultural mission work with Bunun people. Rev Hu rose to the task and began to learn one of the major Bunun dialects. But he needed a long-term language helper. That’s when he invited teenaged Manias to teach him Bunun, while he taught Manias the basics of Bible translation. Manias’ face still lights up every time he tells me about Rev Hu and those early days translating books in the New Testament. In hindsight Manias marvels at the ways God prepared him and the ways God continues to use him as the day to complete the long task begun in the 1950s draws nearer.
Bunun Bible translation review team
Patience and perseverance. Relying always on the grace and mercy of God. These attributes have helped Manias through decades of pastoral ministry with Bunun families who migrated to big cities looking for jobs, and Bunun Bible translation work. After two different cancer operations and ongoing medicinal therapy, Manias presses on with God as his source of strength. I am inspired by the way he has learned all the latest computer tools that help us make his good Bunun translation even better. It is a joy and an honour to serve by his side or via the internet.
Manias prays we can finalize the Bunun translation by the end of this year. Then after typesetting and printing, he hopes to hold the complete Bunun Bible in his hands in the summer of 2018. And then? Keep teaching younger Bunun generations to cherish and hold on to their beautiful language and culture, as they live and share the Good News of God in Bunun.
<<Isang kasu Sasbinazdihanin, alhaiapav ang Suu a sinkadaidaz,
malhaiap mas maisihabas mathas saduan a nii tu min-u-uvaiv tu daidaz (chesed).>>
“Remember your mercy, O LORD, and your steadfast love (chesed),
for they have been from of old.” (Psalm 25:6, ESV)
