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NEW TESTAMENT IN INUKTITUT — Inuktitut Bible translators Jonas Allooloo (left) and Benjamin Arreak (right) flank Hart Wiens, director of Scripture translation for the Canadian Bible Society, who holds a copy of the New Testament in Inuktitut. (RNS photo/Csillag)

Arctic Christians get first complete Inuit Bible

By Ron Csillag

TORONTO (RNS) — The Bible is by far the most translated book in history. Portions of the Old and New Testaments have been translated into more than 2,500 languages. According to United Bible Societies, the complete Bible has been rendered into 469 tongues as of 2010.
Add Inuktitut to that list.

Later this spring, an entire Bible in Inuktitut, the language of Inuit people and the most widely spoken Aboriginal tongue in Canada’s Arctic, will be dedicated at an igloo-shaped church in Nunavut.

Begun in 1978, the massive task marks the first time in Canada that a translation of the whole Bible was accomplished entirely by Native speakers of the language rather than by white missionaries.

It was kick-started by the late Rev. Eugene Nida, considered the father of modern biblical translation, whose major contribution to the field was the concept of “functional equivalence.” Instead of using literal translations, the idea was to convey meaning by incorporating Native culture and idiom into the Bible’s story.

Nida’s message to non-Aboriginal translators about the advantage of Native speakers was simple: “You may have learned the language well,” recalled Rev. Jonah Allooloo, an Inuk priest and canon of the Anglican Church of Canada who worked on the Inuktitut project from the start, “but you’ll never learn to think the way these people do.”

Canada’s last census found some 33,000 speakers of Inuktitut, part of the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages. It is spoken in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and northern Quebec, and almost exclusively north of the tree line.

It was an oral language for thousands of years until an Anglican missionary, Edmund Peck, introduced the syllabic script — in which characters represent syllables — in the late 19th century. Most speakers are Christian.

The full translation follows the completion in 1991 of an Inuktitut New Testament, now in its fifth edition. The Old Testament took so long because Allooloo and the project’s translation co-ordinator, retired Anglican Bishop Benjamin Arreak, worked on it for only one or two months of the year.

“We are priests,” Allooloo pointed out. “We have responsibilities. We are on 24-hour call.” And they have a lot of ground to cover: at 15 times the land mass of Great Britain, the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of the Arctic is the world’s largest Christian diocese.

Inuit Christians longed for a complete Bible, Arreak said. During the translation process, “people were saying, ‘If there are rough drafts, can I have a printout?’

“Our people need the whole Word of God to be inspired and strengthened and as a guide for their lives.”

But adapting the Old Testament, with its litany of desert vegetation and animals, to an Arctic readership presented challenges.

For one, there are no words in Inuktitut for “goat,” “sheep” or “camel.” Those had to be written phonetically.

And what do to about the 30-plus types of trees mentioned in the Bible when there are no trees of any kind for hundreds of miles in the Arctic?

“We used a general term for tree,” explained Allooloo, “and then explained it in the footnotes.” The translation brims with footnotes and explications.

The same word was used for “shepherd” as for someone who tends a dog team. “It’s like ‘babysitter,’ ” said Arreak. Similarly, “pomegranate” is described as a sweet fruit with many seeds.

He and Allooloo agree that the Old Testament was easier to translate than the New because both Jewish and Aboriginal traditions stress the oral tradition of storytelling and history.

Apart from their obvious language skills, the translators relied on a computer program called Paratext, software that provides access to biblical texts in the original Hebrew and Greek, and permits users to create databases in dozens of target languages. It allows onscreen editing, analysis, explanatory notes and overall quality assurance.

The new Bible will go a long way to boost literacy and help redress past wrongs, said Hart Wiens, translation director for the Canadian Bible Society, which co-sponsored the $1.7 million Inuktitut project with the Anglican Church of Canada.

“Increasingly, Native people are saying, ‘the church or Christianity or western influence have taken our language away and you have a responsibility to restore it,’ ” said Wiens, who has guided Bible translations into Mohawk, Cree and Algonquin. “No book has contributed more to language maintenance and literacy than the Bible.”