Transcript
STEPHEN PATTEMORE: They came to the Bible Society asking for technical help and the Bible Society has been supplying training and technical support to the Tokelauan translators who've done all the real work and it's been a co-operative venture. They have a Tokelauan society for the translation of the bible which is an inter-church committee comprising largely the Congregational Church, the Pacific Islands congregations of the Presbyterian Church and some Catholic involvement. The first translators were appointed in 1996 and two of them are still at work today. Ioane Teao and Loimata Iupati, particularly Ioane Teao, has been the one who's driven the project all the way.
DOMINIC GODFREY: Now that inter-church council of which you spoke, sorry the committee.
SP: Yep.
DG: I guess that really helps so that there's no subjectivity around it, agreement at a sort of ecumenical level?
SP: Yes, yes, the Bible Society always prefers to work with groups of Christian communities together rather than trying to do things for individual denominations. So it was important that all of the churches where there are significant numbers of Tokelauans should be represented.
DG: So the bible that was translated, that was used as the basis, I'm asuming from English, which bible was it?
SP: It's been a mix. We train people to use a range of English bible translations or other major language bible translations depending on where they are but in this case it was English. We train them to use at least one formal translation and at least one common language translation such as the Good News Bible. The image that I try and project to them is that if they don't read Hebrew and Greek then the biblical texts are, if you like, locked away in a room but fortunately people have knocked windows into the room and each of the English translations represents a window on the text, and the more windows you look through the better three-dimensional perspective you get on the text.
DG: So where is the text at now? What stage is it at?
SP: We have the whole bible. Old and New Testaments. That is the Protestant Canon is complete. There's quite a bit of checking still to do. We have several books of the Catholic Deuterocanon translated but that's still a distance to go there. But the Protestant text is complete and we're working very hard on both community level checking and consultant checking to have it finalised for publication, hopefully next year.
DG: And so the Catholic Canon, where to with this next?
SP: What we really would like is some more involvement from Catholic translators.
DG: So the name for The Bible itself, in Samoan it's Tusi Paia - the pious book and that comes from the Latin, is that the same in Catholic Tokelau?
SP: They haven't decided on what the whole thing is going to be called yet. This is a completely new venture you see because they have been using the Samoan for 150 years or so and one of the things they decided very early on was that they weren't going to refer to the Samoan as a source text. This was going to be a new Tokelauan translation which found its own way starting from English base rather than constantly referring to the Samoan.
