Canada: Inuit Language Now Has Their Own Bible After 34 yrs. Of Translation

CANADA--After 34 painstaking years, a small band of Inuit translators have finally delivered an Inuktitut-language Bible to one of the most-Christian regions in Canada.
The completed Inuit-language bible, a $1.7 million joint project of the the Canadian Bible Society and the

Anglican Church, is set to be launched on June 3 in a ceremony at the igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Anglican Cathedral in Iqaluit.

“We’re happy to have this out of the way,” said Rev. Canon Jonas Allooloo, who was with the translation team since its 1978 inception. “It’s been 34 years and we can do something else now.”
Five Anglican ministers led the project, and notably, all were Inuk. “For the first time in Canada, the entire translation was done by mother tongue speakers of the language rather than by missionaries,” reads a statement by the Canadian Bible Society.

The team was thus well-equipped to bridge the many linguistic and cultural gaps between the Inuit and millennia-old Middle Eastern texts.

“Bible translation in general is a time-consuming activity. It was very complicated, especially when the languages, cultures and geographical contexts in the Bible are vastly different from those of the Arctic,” Hart Wiens, director of Scripture translation for the Canadian Bible Society, told the Post in 2002.

For “shepherd,” the text uses an Inuktitut word that describes both a babysitter and someone who would watch over a dog team.

When the Bible mentions specific tree species, the Inuktitut text will often rely on a generic word for “tree.”

“It’s just like you have one word for snow but we have many words for snow,” said Rev. Allooloo.
When the translators encountered items for which there is no Inuktitut term — such as pomegranates and camels — they borrowed the English word. “We borrowed a lot of words,” said Rev. Allooloo.

The really difficult words, said Rev. Allooloo, were “peace” and “grace” — two concepts for which there are no Inuit terms. Translators had to instead describe the specific situation surrounding the word, be it a sense of inner peace or a state of non-war.

The project was launched by Eugene Nida, an Oklahoma-born linguist famous as the father of modern Bible translation. To ensure that 4,000-year-old Middle Eastern texts could be understood by Asian subsistence farmers and African hunter-gatherers alike, Mr. Nida was a proponent of creating non-literal Bible translations that incorporated indigenous terms and concepts. He died last year at the age of 96.

The Bible is printed in syllabics, the Inuktitut written language first introduced in the 1800s by Anglican missionaries. Prior to European arrival, Inuktitut was an oral tongue
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