Igbo New World Translation

The Igbo New World Translation (INWT) of the Bible was published in 2007 by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Brooklyn, New York (Watch Tower, henceforth). The Watch Tower is a society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination. The website of the Society stipulates that it (the Watch Tower) “is used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to support their worldwide work, which includes publishing Bibles

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and Bible-based literature”⁶³. The Society’s translation of the Bible is called New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures and it is reported that this translation has been made, in whole or in part, in over 150 languages⁶⁴. The Igbo version, Baịbụl Nsọ: Nsụgharị Ụwa Ohụrụ nke Akwụkwọ Nsọ, is one of such translations.

In the Okwu Mmalite page of the INWT, it is stated that the Igbo translation was made from the 1984 version of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (INWT: 5). Additional information clarifies that the INWT contains the 39 books of the Hebrew scriptures and “a reprint of the 27 books of the Christian Greek scriptures in Igbo published in 2001” (my translation). This suggests that the New Testament of the INWT was published in 2001, six years before the complete translation was published. The expression Nsụgharị Ụwa Ohụrụ nke Akwụkwọ Nsọ in the title of the Bible is a literal translation of “New World Translation of the Holy Book”. There is no available information on the committee that did the translation and the background of the translators themselves. These are kept anonymous by the Society, which makes it difficult to comment on the history of this translation.

However, since the New World Translations, in whatever language, are all produced by the Watch Tower with the same ideology, certain information on the English version of the New World Translation could be applied to the Igbo version, especially as regards translation policies and principles.

In an article titled “Why have we produced the New World Translation?⁶⁵, the Watch Tower submits that, although they were using other translations of the Bible, they later “saw the need to produce a new translation that would better help people to learn the ‘accurate knowledge of truth’”. In other words, the main motivation for the translation is the belief that other translations of the Bible contain certain perceived inaccuracies, which the New World Translation (NWT henceforth) is meant to correct. These perceived inaccuracies are

63 https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/watchtower-society/, accessed July 12, 2016.

64 “The Word of Our God Endures Forever” https://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/watchtower-study-september-2017/word-of-our-god-endures-forever/, accessed July 12, 2016.

65 Published online at https://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/jehovahs-will/new-world-translation/

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explained in the Foreword⁶⁶ to the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures (1985). Here, it is stated that existing translations of the Bible into English

have fallen victim to the power of religious traditions in varying degrees.

Consequently, religious traditions, hoary with age, have been taken for granted and gone unchallenged and uninvestigated. These have been interwoven into the translations to colour the thought. (Watch Tower 1985:

7)

In other words, other translations of the Bible are perceived by the Watch Tower as being inaccurate, having been affected by the ideologies of other religious traditions. Thus, the NWT was produced to correct these perceived inaccuracies.

Another perceived inaccuracy is the traditional division of the Bible into Old and New Testaments. On this, the Watch Tower insists that the Latin word translated as “testament”

in English refers to “covenant”, which makes “testament” misleading. Hence, the Watch Tower prefers to identify these parts of the Bible by the language in which the original texts were written: “Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures” for the “Old Testament” and “Greek scriptures” for the “New Testament” (c.f. Appendix 5d of the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures). The INWT has the same titles for the divisions. In the Okwu Mmalite it is stated that “the Bible is indeed one book, there is no part of it that has passed its time, or that is now ‘old’. There is agreement among its content, starting from the first book in the Hebrew section, to the last book in the Greek section” (INWT 2007: 5, my translation).

Furthermore, another motivation for the translation of the NWT is the need to update the language of the Bible, as languages do “change over time, and many translations contain obscure or obsolete expressions that are difficult to understand” (“Why have we produced the New World Translation”). The NWT is meant to present the obscure expressions in a

66 Although the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures is different from the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, both texts were published by the same Society. Besides, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is one of the three Bibles contained in this publication and so the Foreword contains information on it.

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way the reader would understand them, and use current idioms in place of the obsolete ones:

We have disposed of archaic language altogether, even in prayers and addresses to God […] The original Bible was written in the living languages of the people of the day, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; and so the Bible characters addressed God and prayed to him in the same everyday language that they employed in speaking to their fellow creatures on earth. The translation of the Scriptures into a modern language should be rendered in the same style, in the speech forms current among the people. (Watch Tower 1985: 9)

This statement presupposes the existence of an earlier Bible translation whose language has become obsolete and in need of updating. Watch Tower (1985: 7) acknowledges the existence of earlier translations into English, which the NWT is meant to correct. However, regarding the INWT, no reference is made to an earlier translation of the Bible into Igbo.

This is clearly an indication of the Watch Tower’s rejection of these earlier translations because of the ideologies they are believed to portray. Despite this silence on the existence of earlier translations, findings in this study show that the INWT also used terms created in these earlier translations, which is an indication that they accept some of the lexical innovations of these other translations.

Furthermore, the Watch Tower claims that there are recent discoveries of “ancient manuscripts that are more accurate and closer to the originals”, which make for a “a better comprehension of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek”. This translation is then presented as the best translation of the Bible available. Be that as it may, the Igbo version of this translation is made into Standard Igbo and in the Standard Igbo orthography.

This chapter has demonstrated that translations are produced within a given temporal and spatial setting and these settings are factors that influence the whole translation process and product. The chapter has revealed not only the impact of history on Bible translations into Igbo, but also how the choices, actions and inactions of the agents involved in the

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translation enterprise have affected the Bible translation landscape on the one hand, and Igbo language on the other.

Although the Bible translations are all made for use in Christiaan religious activities, the motivations for the translations are not necessarily the same. In the missionary era, the driving force was to have the Bible in the language of the people so that it would facilitate their conversion to Christianity. Being that the Igbo language was not yet reduced to writing, it behoves the missionaries to study and reduce the language to writing, an arduous task indeed. With little linguistic experience and poor knowledge of the Igbo language, the missionaries were faced with more challenges than just transferring meaning across languages. They had to create new words to cater for concepts that were not in the people’s cosmology or use existing words but complemented with extra teachings so that the people would understand the sense meant in the given context. However, the case was different for translations done in the second epoch, this time by native Igbo Christians. At this point, there were existing translations and so the translators’ motivation was not to have a Bible in the language. Rather, they were concerned with simplifying or updating the language of the Bible to reflect current usages. Importantly too is the fact that the Bible became a site to front the ideology of the translating denomination. This point is seen mainly in the translations done by the Igbo Catholics and the Jehovah’s Witnesses reflected in their choice of Bible texts – to include or not to include the Apocryphal texts – and in the techniques of representing certain concepts (expatiated upon in the following chapters). It is also not mere coincidence that the translations in the second era started in the height of nationalistic activities across Africa. Bible translation at the time became a site for nationalistic identity and activism, a point further demonstrated in Chapter 6.

Furthermore, the dialects into which the translations were made are also a reflection of the prevailing situation at the time of translation. The first set of translations were made in Sierra Leone, and so the dialect studied and translated into was the Isuama spoken at Freetown. After the missionaries arrived Igboland in the mid-1800s, they were not able to penetrate the Igbo hinterland and so they operated from the fringes. Surprisingly, rather than work with the dialects they encountered, they worked with the dialect they knew from Freetown in the hope of locating where it is spoken in Igboland. With their inability to

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locate where Isuama was spoken, they had to discontinue with it and started translating into the dialects of the parts of Igboland where they situated their headquarters, namely, Bonny and Onitsha. Again, with the success at penetrating the Igbo hinterland in the late 1890s, there was the need to have a translation understood by every Igbo speaker.

Consequently, an artificial dialect– Union Igbo – was created into which the Bible was translated. This Union Igbo was based on the dialects spoken in areas the missionaries were able to penetrate. According to Achebe (1979: 35), the dialects of Igbo spoken in “the whole territory from Awka through Enugu to Nsukka and Abakaliki and also all the Igbo speaking area west of the Niger” were not included in the Union Igbo project. Clearly, the dialects chosen and included in creating Union Igbo were perceived to be the main dialects spoken in the parts of Igboland known to the missionaries. By the time the translations in the second era began, a lot of progress had been made at evolving a standard dialect of Igbo. So, this became the dialect into which the later translations were made.

A similar situation is seen in the choice of orthography. During the missionary era, the prevailing orthography was the Lepsius orthography of 1855, the Igbo section of which was expanded with the works of J. F. Schön, the major voice in Igbo language studies at the time.

The introduction of the African orthography in 1927 created some conflicts as the CMS, which was the major institution involved in Bible translation into Igbo would not accept the new orthography for economic reasons. Their rival, the RCM accepted the new orthography, and so, both orthographies became associated with specific Christian denominations – the Lepsius orthography seen as the CMS orthography and the government’s African orthography identified as the Catholic orthography. This rivalry impinged on further productions of texts in Igbo, including Bible translations. However, when this squabble was settled with the introduction of the Ọnwụ orthography, Bible translation works were resumed in earnest and all the subsequent translations were done in the new orthography. Besides the politics in the choice of the Lepsius or the African orthographies, there is also a lot of politics in the power tussle between the European missionaries and the Africans which culminated in some translations being encouraged and others stifled. First, the translations being done by Taylor in the 1860s were questioned by the German Schön who had the backing of the CMS Parent Committee. Frustrated, Taylor

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abandoned working for the missions and this marked the end of what would have being the first translation of the complete Bible into Igbo. Perhaps if this translation had succeeded in being completed and published, the future of Igbo Bible translation would have been different. Perhaps, like the Yoruba Bible of the same period which contributed in evolving the Yoruba literary standard, this suppressed translation would have evolved an Igbo literary standard, based on a living dialect of Igbo unlike the UIB whose biggest drawback was that it was an artificial dialect. A second example of a suppressed translation was also a result of some misunderstanding between the African Henry Johnson and the European Henry Dobinson. Again, the African discontinued the translation project, which were inherited and completed by Dobinson and his team. A third instance of Bible translation projects suspended mid-way was the translations into the dialects of Bonny and Onitsha, which had reached advanced stages before the order to discontinue was given. There was already an NT translation into the Onitsha dialect published and the OT was already completed when the English man T. J. Dennis advanced the idea of a Union version.

Although the Igbo representatives on the translation committees vehemently opposed the Union translation, they were intimidated by the prevailing power and authority of the Europeans. A Union Bible was not only produced, it was also imposed on the Igbo Christians. Put simply, the final decisions on translations and translation techniques were taken by the Europeans, and at times imposed on the dissenting voices of the Africans.

One does not witness such power tussles, suppression of on-going translations or imposition of disparate opinions in the native Igbo era. The power relations among the different agents and institutions were symmetrical, such that the Bible Society of Nigeria that started their translation before the Living Bible Nigeria could not dissuade the latter from producing their own translation. Besides, although the Igbo Catholics were involved in the translation of the New Testament of the IRE, they could not be discouraged from producing an Igbo Catholic Bible fit for the Igbo Catholic faithful. So, the symmetrical power relations between the different institutions made for the production of four complete Bible translations into Igbo in two decades, after experiencing over five decades without a single Bible translation published.

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In conclusion, the era in which the Bible translations into Igbo were made does not only determine the motivations for the translations, it also reflects the prevailing power relations and tussles among the agents and institutions involved. These also greatly affected the translation techniques adopted in the various Bible translations. In the following three chapters, I explore the techniques for creating lexical items in the translations and the representations of Christian concepts in the Bible, first from a synchronic perspective (Chapters 4 and 5), and then from a diachronic viewpoint (Chapter 6).

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CHAPTER 4