Translation

Sometimes I get concerned that seminaries, our schools training pastors, spend too much time teaching their students how to translate Greek and Hebrew.  Don't get me wrong, I recognize that these can be valuable skills.  I just wish there was as much time, or more, spent on learning to translate into the common, everyday vernacular of the people.  We spend time in learning Spanish in classroom, but then we meet people who have moved here from Mexico and we discover we've learned a rather different language.  So now we learn Spanish in an immersion setting, so we not only learn the proper grammar but the way people speak Spanish.  We need to do the same with English.  The English in the theology books is good English, but it's not always the English you hear at the food court in the mall.  If we are to get the word of our faith out to the common, everyday person who spends time at the mall then we need to learn to speak their language, to translate into that language.
 
I came across a quote today from an e-mail mailing list I'm on from C.S. Lewis that gets at this as well.  I would like to share it with you now.
 
"An essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English - just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this part should mean failure on the whole exam.  It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu, but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language: the vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it."
     ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) in "The Christian Century"