Bzulu bziwiri na kumi na mawiri or 2012 or whatever...

There are parts of Bible translation we don't really think about...

We just got an email asking about how we plan to write numbers. Do you spell them out or do you write the numerals? There is a "rule" in English where anything over ten you usually just use a numeral in a text. (Though I noticed this isn't followed in the English Bible I use.) There just aren't any norms for this in Nyungwe. There aren't lots of books written, so you can't just see what other people are doing. Besides, it is a bit more complicated than following rules.

In many African languages the counting system is a little cumbersome. It takes a lot of long words to spell out a big number. It is common to hear English or Portuguese numbers spoken in the middle of a Nyungwe or Chewa conversation. It isn't that the numbers don't exist in the language, but they just use English or Portuguese numbers because they are easier or they are used to them.

So this morning, we were thinking about the biggest number you would even count up to in a Nyungwe village. Someone might count baskets of corn... or how many goats or cows in a herd. They might count wives or children. They might cont how many bricks they need for a house. (Though traditionally they would build with sticks and mud and would use quantities like "not enough" or "too much") They might count paces to measure a field. Most of the numbers a normal person would use in daily life are under a hundred.

Most of the really big numbers would be for weights or money or a census for government purpose. If you are weighing something in kilos, that would drop you into a Portuguese mode automatically. If you are taking a government count, you will report in Portuguese so you would fall into Portuguese counting. If you are dealing with large sums of money, you will most likely count in Portuguese. So the use for big numbers is pretty much in a context where Portuguese is used by default.


We want to affirm the Nyungwe culture and show the world that anything that can be said in English or Portuguese can also be said in a local language. BUT the general population doesn't actually USE the Nyungwe words for numbers all that often (at least not when counting over about ten.)


In Acts, there are only a few numbers and it isn't a big deal: there's "kumi na m'bozi" for "eleven" and "bzulu bzitatu" for "three thousand." But thinking back to Genesis, there are all those people who lived hundreds of years with their ages recorded carefully for posterity ("Noah was nine hundred and fifty years old when he died"). The team wrestled through all the trouble of spelling all those numbers out in words (madzana mapfemba na makumi maxanu) so that readers in church wouldn't have to try to come up with the Nyungwe words for the numbers themselves (and we would be spared cringing at the automatic switch into Portuguese by a reader presented with a numeral).

Looking back, it might not have been the most helpful choice. For a newly literate reader who already struggles with so many words on a page, does he need the numbers spelled out or is it best to just write the numerals? What purpose do the numbers serve in the Bible text? I debated with myself for a few minutes and came to the conclusion that sometimes the numbers are important just to show us that records were kept and the text is based on carefully recorded facts. Sometimes a number is recorded to show us how very BIG or small something was in comparison to something else. In any case, they are part of Bible translation and have to be done, but what is useful for the reader remains to be seen. If they write the numerals, many people will insert Portuguese number words in while reading aloud. If they write out the numbers, they will risk long chains of words that readers don't really use in daily life.

Personally, if I see numerals, I register "big number," "small number,"  "huge ginormous number" quite automatically without paying much attention to the quantity. I think in most cases for Bible reading that is enough. Which has more impact on us? "Jesus fed five thousand" or "Jesus fed 5,000." This is the kind of stuff people study for a masters degree. There are certainly many theses written on the topic and I'm not going to read them. But I'll just bet someone out there has very strong feelings on the subject and we will hear about it soon!