Impacting lives through the translated Word

As Global Gathering 2024 delegates reflected on Saturday’s theme. The Translated Word, writer Isaac Forchie sat down with Marilina Bongarrá de Vega, LETRA Argentina’s Board Chair, to discuss how Bible translation has impacted lives in Southeast Asia. Marilina worked as a translator before going on to become a Bible translation consultant. 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? 

I was born in Argentina and together with my husband, we joined Wycliffe in 1999 — that’s last century. There wasn’t any Wycliffe Argentina or any other way we could join Wycliffe at the time. So Wycliffe USA emerged and that was the first chance we had to join Wycliffe. In 2001, we left to serve in Southeast Asia. 

In Southeast Asia, we served the Bonia Community. We worked with them in language development, producing dictionaries and running a multilingual education project. Some of the languages we worked with already had a translation, some didn’t. In one of those groups, the Catholic Church had been trying to translate the Bible for many years as they had been using the mother tongue. They had some portions of Scriptures but they were not happy, having only that. 

We met this man who had been translating the Bible for many years. He had drafted the New Testament twice, but one time the manuscript was burned and another time the priest took it to Europe and died there, so there was no way to retrieve the draft he had worked on. We became friends with one of the priests and he invited us to help in translating the Bible. As we started to work with them a couple of times a week, we made an estimate of how much time it would take to finish the New Testament—it would take many decades to get it done! So the parish decided to appoint a full-time translation team and that each village was going to give money to pay for the translators’ salaries.

They said, ‘Since we have the resources we don’t need to let this offer go in vain’. This is how we started drafting the New Testament in 2005. The project went on for about 15 years and the New Testament was published in 2020. We served the national translators in that way and it was a wonderful opportunity. 

How important would you say Bible translation is to communities?

Translation work is of course very important. The community we served longed to have the Bible. They didn’t just want the New Testament—they are currently working on the Old Testament. When I first heard about people not having access to God’s Word, I just couldn’t imagine being a Christian without being able to read the Bible. Then I met many people who didn’t have God’s Word, but they wanted to know about Jesus. 

While translation work was going on, I started a Bible study with ladies from the community. Each time we finished a book, I would test it with the ladies. So we would study Ephesians and Philippians and it was amazing to me how they were impacted by the Word. They were like, ‘So the Bible says this?’ They had no knowledge about Bible things. 

I remember one lady told me she thought [the Apostle] Paul was Pope John Paul II. They were so happy to learn the whole history of the Bible—the New Testament and the Old Testament. It is so important to see first-hand the impact that the Scriptures have in their lives. 

Can you share an experience or a lesson you learned while a translator?

One time we were working on Luke 7, where Jesus resurrected the widow’s son, and something happened that changed my way of doing translation. I had so much to learn in the way they see translation. Sometimes we thought we would teach them how to do exegesis—and in a way, we taught a lot of things, but we also learned a lot of things. I remember how we read this passage with the team. Jesus sees the people coming out with the body of the boy who had died and he is filled with compassion and so he extends his hands and touches the boy. When we read that, the whole room was: ‘He touched the dead person!’ In their culture, it was so terrible to touch a corpse for anything. And that was close to the Jewish culture at the time where if you touched someone who had died, you would be defiled. 

I was like, I have read this several times and in my culture, it is just normal for people to touch corpses. Sometimes people will even embrace them and kiss them. But for them, they really caught the significant moment when Jesus extended his hand and touched this boy and that created a big impact for them. So I was like, I need to be attentive to learn from them and to get closer to their culture. We were all moved by Jesus’s touch and compassion and miracles. I also learned that I need to look at the culture of the people to better reach out to them. 

As a translator, what impact of Bible translation have you seen?

We left right after we finished the New Testament and we had to come back to our home country. We were not there to see how they used it, but we know they are using it. We know that both the Catholic Church and the evangelical church are using it for their Bible studies and that it is creating a significant impact. We also had a team from FCBH (Faith Comes by Hearing) come and record the New Testament, so they are using Proclaimers to do Scripture engagement, and that is exciting. Given that we published the New Testament and the pandemic started, the church faced a distributing challenge, but as soon as restrictions were lifted all the books were sold. 

I was thinking about something that happened to me last month when I went back to do a consultant check - it was amazing! We were checking the book of Joshua and we were working on the story of Rahab. They were shocked by how God had compassion for her and her family even though she was a prostitute. It was really hard for them to figure that out. It was great! The next day, I told them we would read Matthew 1. And they again heard of Rahab in the genealogy. They were amazed and shocked about Jesus’s mercy as they heard that she was part of Jesus’ ancestry which is a very big thing in their culture. There was this man who turned and looked at me and said: ‘We really need the Old Testament. If we don’t have the Old Testament, how are we ever going to understand the New Testament?’

That for me was so nice to hear, and we know this, and that is why they press on with the Old Testament project. This man said he was going to come for all the Old Testament checks because this is very important work. We were doing the book of Exodus recently and these people had never heard of Moses, and the wonders the Lord had done during that time. So they were just so amazed. One man stood up amid the checking session and said, ‘What an amazing God we serve!’ This was the same God they were worshipping for many years, but they knew very little about him. It was amazing to see them learn about God more deeply. 

Interviewed by: Isaac Forchie. Photo: Jennifer Pillinger.