New Testament: Pinoy Version. Manila: Philippine Bible Society, 2018. 609 pp. ISBN 978-971-29-1183-5
The work of translation is not as simple as it seems. Translating a work is quite different from translating a sentence in everyday conversation. This I discovered soon after I ventured into translation work with Laudato Si, which has since led to a number of other translations in Filipino and English of some texts of Pope Francis, including Amoris Laetitia, Misericordia et Misera and The Name of God is Mercy.
Initially, my interest in languages was only inspired by a happy initiation with Latin which was later on spurred by a fancy desire to read my favorite saints in their original settings: Thérèse de Lisieux in French as well as Teresa de Avila and the master poet Juan dela Cruz in Spanish. As such, it was a pursuit of knowledge in the service of self. I wanted to understand, comprehend, and appreciate texts in a deeper, richer way.
On the other hand, the work of translation is fundamentally a work in the service of others. No translator does it for oneself. From trying to understand, comprehend and appreciate a text, the role of a translator shifts to making a text understood, comprehended and appreciated by an audience apart from oneself. When I was doing Laudato Si’, I was thinking in concrete of Tagalog-speaking catechists, trying to explain the contents of the Pope’s encyclical to their students. How was I going to make the Pope’s message understood, comprehended and appreciated by them so that they could in turn communicate it to their audiences? Especially since I intended it to be a pastoral rather than academic translation, the foremost concern really was to be understood.
This is where I believe the New Testament: Pinoy Version is faithful to the basic orientation of translation as a work of service. Since it is a pastoral translation, it is decidedly not a literary masterpiece in the mode of ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake, nor is it an academic or scientific endeavor. One must bear in mind, first of all, that it is a translation made for today’s Filipinos and for personal reading, rather than for serious analysis or for liturgical purposes. As the paragraph printed at the back of the book explicitly states: “Nagtataka ka ba kung anong version ng Bible ang hawak mo ngayon? Kung gusto mong basahin ang Bible sa language na ginagamit mo araw-araw, ang Pinoy version ang swak sayo. ‘Pinoy’ ang tawag sa translation na ito dahil gamit dito ang mga salita at expressions ng mga Pinoy ngayon – estudyante, empleyado, nanay, tatay, ate, kuya, teacher, negosyante, writer, artist... at kahit sino ka pa!” Its express intention is to make the Word of God accessible and relatable: “Buksan mo, basahin mo, at makikita mo na ang Salita ng Diyos ay hindi pala mahirap maintindihan. Higit sa lahat, mari-realize mo na applicable ito sa buhay mo.”
Its critics might balk at the kind of language employed in the translation, which is an uncanny mixture of English and Tagalog, more akin to what you will hear in television than in the pulpit. Yet as one of its translators, Dr. Annie Del Corro, accurately points out, the Philippine archipelago has always been a multi-lingual country and even the language that we call Filipino is a conglomerate of our native languages with much foreign influence as an outcome of our long history as a people. Even when it comes to saying something as basic and banal as “Kumusta ka?,“ we are not really speaking in “pure” Filipino, if there is such a thing. Cómo estás, as we well know, is Spanish for “how are you” which has morphed over time into the local form, kumusta. And to this we usually respond “Ok lang ako,” O.K. being our appropriation of the English, okay. Yesterday’s code-switching is now today’s Filipino. It may not be too far-fetched to say that today’s code-switching may be the Filipino of the future.
Some critics may also say that this kind of language is inelegant, at the very least, or even irreverent and inappropriate, as a medium in which to render the Word of God. I personally suspect they are in the same league with those who imagine Latin to be the language of God and prefer translations akin to the 2010 English translation of the Roman Missal, which employed the principle of formal equivalence on the basis of the document Liturgiam Authenticam [under review with the blessing of Pope Francis], rather than earlier translations that espouse the principle of dynamic equivalence following the directives of the post-conciliar Instruction Comme Le Prévoit. Nevertheless, while the new translation can be more faithful and accurate, if not also more regal and refined compared to the old one, it is also more difficult and distant for many of today’s worshippers.
Some critics may also take the path of pointing out passages that are awkward and ridiculous to them. Yet it cannot be denied that the New Testament: Pinoy Version, which has sold more than 20,000 copies in just about a month after it was launched in September 2018, has fared rather well in sparking the interest of today’s readers and drawing people to pick up the Bible in the form of this new version. If errors are all that we will look for anywhere, the world will run out of fossil fuels before we could run out of mistakes to find.
On the properly theological level, however, the most essential question needs to be asked: can any language, or anything human for that matter, be deemed unworthy or alien to the Word of God? Not after the Incarnation, certainly, where the Word made flesh became one with us “in all things but sin” (cf. Heb 4:15). After all, Jesus himself spoke Aramaic instead of the more cultured Hebrew and the original New Testament was written, not in the cadenced Latin of Cicero or the polished Greek of the sophists, but in Koine Greek, the tongue of the hoi polloi or common people.
This very attitude of imitating the humility of the Word of God himself is one of the key things that Augustine proposed in De Catechizandis Rudibus to the deacon, Deogratias, who was struggling to effectively preach the Word of God. The heart of a true pastor bends one’s language to one’s hearers, the bishop advices, for “how, indeed, should one be ready to be spent for their souls, if he should find it irksome to him to bend himself to their ears?” And then he turns immediately to the Incarnation, or what we refer to, most beautifully, in theology as the divine condescension or kenosis of God: “For this reason, therefore, He became a little child in the midst of us, (and) like a nurse cherishing her children. For is it a pleasure to lisp shortened and broken words, unless love invites us?” (15).
This novel attempt to translate the New Testament, unsurprisingly imperfect like any human work, is a way of lisping in shortened and broken words the Word of God to our people today. Just as certainly, it is a work of love on the part of the translators and a true service to its contemporary Filipino hearers, especially the young. While this translation itself in its present form is surely open to improvements and even corrections, it deserves to be commended and promoted as a positive contribution to evangelization.