Fr. Chad Hatfield: I’m Fr. Chad Hatfield, the chancellor of St. Vladimir’s Seminary and the sessional professor of missiology at the seminary. For our listeners with Ancient Faith Radio, welcome, and tonight it’s our privilege to hear Dr. Michael Colburn, who is a person with an enormous passion for translation into various languages. Yesterday at Holy Cross Seminary in Boston, I heard him speak for a bit, and I’m still sort of pondering how in the world one accomplishes translating 2,000 African languages—not dialects, but distinct languages—into the Divine Liturgy, Scripture translations. At least, if I’m correct, half of the island of Papua New Guinea you can find 800 different languages spoken on just half of the island. So it’s an enormous task, but it’s crucial to our understanding of the presentation of Orthodoxy to the world, especially in that spirit and tradition of St. Innocent of Alaska, who understood the significance of translations serving the people, and preaching and teaching in the languages they understand.

Dr. Michael is an OCMC missionary specialist in linguistics and translation, [and] has as his vision every Orthodox Christian parish in the world will have the opportunity to worship God using the mother tongue of its parishioners, and their mission is to equip translators of the Orthodox liturgical texts with the knowledge and tools they need to produce accurate and understandable translations that speak to the hearts of those who pray here or read them. So, Dr. Colburn, welcome to St. Vladimir’s. We hope that this isn’t your last visit, but one of many, as you help us in developing our own missiological track. So, welcome. [Applause]

Dr. Michael Colburn: Reverend Fathers and faculty, brothers and sisters, thank you so much for the privilege of being here. I, too, hope that this is just one of many years of being here, being helped and giving help, as God provides.

I’d like to start out with something that you probably know, but please indulge me: the question of what is the scope of the Great Commission. We read in Matthew 28:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…”

Which, by the way, includes the command to go and make disciples.

“...and remember I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

When we look in the Greek—forgive me: there are people who know Greek much better than I, so if I go astray, let me know—ethnoi, not vasileias. What is an ethnos? One lexicon defines it as “a body of persons united by kinship, culture, and common traditions; nation; and people.” Oddly, this definition leaves out a key word: language. So we’ll just supply that.

In missiology, we tend to use the phrase “people group” instead of “nation,” and use it loosely as a synonym. The reason that we do this is because that, generally speaking, we can say that, for each language spoken, that’s at least one people group, but in fact, within a certain linguistic area, there can be more than one people group. The definition of “people group” from the Lausanne Committee is, for evangelization purposes: “a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church-planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” Language and culture become barriers to understanding, and culture can become a barrier to acceptance.

So let’s stop for just a minute and consider the question: Why do we do translations? We know from Scripture that the Lord does not want anyone to perish, but that all should come to repentance. And I would suggest to you that translations are key—not the key, but they’re key— to the process of being healed by God, and when I say “healed by God,” I mean it in the Orthodox sense of healing of the whole man and his faculties and his restoration of union with God.

In Matthew 13, with the parable of the sower and some explanation of that by the Lord, I know that in that passage, he’s actually saying that he speaks in parables so that people don’t understand under certain circumstances, but buried in that is a truth of the process of how people turn to God and are healed. If you start at the bottom, it says: See with their eyes and hear with their ears, and the result of that is understanding, and not just understanding but understanding with the heart. I’d like to suggest to you that our mother tongue, the language which we learned growing up, the one we know best, is often the key to understanding with the heart, because the heart suggests being moved. It is only—or often; I’m not going to say “only—it is often in hearing the Gospel proclaimed in the tongue that is our mother tongue that we’re most likely to be moved. And that movement results in turning, and the turning results in being healed by God.

But all too often, language becomes a barrier. People can come to our services, they can see the censer swung, they can hear the words being spoken, but they do not understand with their heart, so they do not turn and they are not healed. Worse yet, the Lord says that when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. So it is a serious matter.

This is a map from an interesting website. It’s http://www.ethnologue.com—maybe .org; you’ll have to see. It has information about the world’s languages. There are now 7100 languages listed; it used to be 6,000; they’ve apparently found more. These are living languages. Notice the distribution. Each red dot represents a language. Notice how they cluster around the equator and particularly it seems a lot on the southern side. 2,146 languages in Africa, as different as English and Russian. 1,000 in the Americas; 2300 in Asia; 284 in Europe, 1300 in Oceania. Why bother? Because Jesus said make disciples of all nations.

As of 2012, the status of Bible translation in the world is, out of 7,105 languages, there are 518 that have the complete Bible in their language. That’s not very many, is it? And think: How many translations of the Bible do we have in English? Is something wrong? Are we neglecting somebody? The number of languages that have the New Testament in their language is 1275, and there are1500 translation projects underway, but still around 2,000 languages which potentially need a translation of the Scriptures in their language.

Very quickly, I want to go over a few things about translation, because it will help me explain the challenge that we face in the mission field for translation of the liturgical text. In translation, we talk about a source language and a target language. The translator’s task, of course, is to understand the meaning and reproduce the meaning accurately in the target language, using language that is natural to that target culture. There is a concept that’s been around for a long time called the meaning triangle. The idea is that words are simply symbols, like the word “dog,” and when we hear it it evokes a concept in our minds: domesticated, carnivorous mammal that typically has a long snout, acute sense of smell, and a barking, howling, or whining voice. That’s the concept. That’s a bit far from our pets that are nice fuzzy things. And then the next part is that it refers to something; it has a referent. Translation work requires not just knowing the symbols and the concepts, but understanding what the writer was referring to.

So what is needed to put an accurate and understandable translation into the hands of the people? I’ve broken these up into three categories of things: on the source side, on the target, and on the process. In the source side, ideally for liturgical translation, one would have expertise in the original language. For the Greek liturgical text, even though it was written after the New Testament, it has elements of classical Greek moreso than Koine Greek.

It also requires knowledge of Eastern Orthodox theology, the services, the rubrics, the cycles, and because you’re translating books that will be used by priests, you have to have the understanding from the priest’s perspective in order to accurately translate. Importantly, you have to understand things that the text is referring to, which often is Scripture, but it could be historical events, it could be the writings of the Fathers. When the hymns were written, they were written at a time and for an audience such that just a few words placed in that hymn would invoke instant understanding by the people who heard it, and move them. If you don’t know what it was referring to today, how can we translate it properly?

Then on the target side, we don’t want a translation to read like it’s a foreigner who happened to learn our language and translate it. It needs to read, and it should be, ideally, by a native speaker of the language. It also requires in-depth knowledge of the target culture, history, and literature, because you have to assess the impact of choice of words. How will it be understood or misunderstood? It also requires knowledge of liturgical practices in the area in which the translation will be used. Ideally, it should also include as part of the process, knowledge of linguistics theory and analysis. This is important for the missionary, because they’re often working in non-Indo-European languages. They have to have the skills that are required to not just become fluent in the language, but know it well enough to handle translation issues.

For the native speaker, it’s been found that it’s valuable to give them a basic course in linguistics to help them become aware of their own language, and so they can understand more of the process of going from the source to the target. So they also need to have knowledge of translation theory and practice, and quality control processes, because over the years there have been techniques developed that go way beyond giving someone a draft and saying, “What do you think of this?” There are procedures that can be followed to test the accuracy and the understandability of the translation.

And translations are projects, often many years of work, and it takes planning and organization. It also requires people who are able to prepare the publication and to get it ready for printing. Do you get the idea that it’s really a team approach that’s required? The ex-patriate missionary, if we had such people who had this background, would have linguistics and translation expertise, expertise in liturgical Greek and in interpretation of the Greek liturgical text—I keep saying “Greek,” but it could be Slavonic—and solid knowledge of target language and culture. And then for the native speaker, of course, native fluency, knowledge of their culture, and knowledge of the Orthodox faith and local church practices. And then the support people, who do the layouts and prepare it for printing and distribution.

It’s in this context that I became involved with OCMC. At the age of 24, having completed an undergraduate degree in biblical studies and two quarters of missiology at a seminary and three semesters of graduate-level linguistics training, I went to Papua New Guinea with the Wycliffe Bible Translators. This is an organization that works in 60 countries and has thousands of missionaries for one and only one purpose, and that is that every language on earth will have a translation of the Scriptures. The island of New Guinea is just north of Australia. The first white man to live in northern New Guinea was from Russia. I wish I could say he was Orthodox, but it looks like he was raised going to Lutheran schools. The eastern half of the island is an independent nation called Papua New Guinea. It has 870 languages, as different as English and Russian or English and Greek. The other side of the island is now called Papua, which is kind of confusing, given that we have Papua New Guinea on the east side. It used to be called Irian Jaya. It’s a province of Indonesia, and it has over 300 different languages. So one-seventh of the world’s languages are all spoken on this one island. Maybe someday I can come back and give a lecture on my experience on reaching the Ogea in terms of dealing with animism and cargo-cult belief. Archaeology says that the New Guineans have been there since 50,000 BC. In 5,000 BC the Austronesians, the Polynesians, if you will, migrated through. There is both linguistic evidence and DNA evidence of this. In fact, Ogea, the language I worked in, is not an Austronesian language, but it has loan words: the word for a pig and for a path and for a canoe, which is kind of surprising, but it’s clearly Austronesian loan words.

The reason I’m bringing this up is just to give you a hint of a lecture I gave on world missions at Holy Cross. There’s a cargo-cult myth in this area of New Guinea about two brothers named Manup and Kulubob, and the younger brother was said to be of lighter skin and very cunning, and he was technologically advanced, and they fought over the older brother’s wife. And the younger brother sailed along the coast, leaving, and put off men and women, and gave them gifts—bow and arrow, yam, taro, bananas—and then sailed off over the horizon. There is evidence that this myth is really rooted in the experience of the Papuans when the Austronesians, the Polynesians, came through New Guinea.

But now when you fast-forward to the 1800s… Oh, and by the way, Manup and Kulubob are like deities, and they’re considered ancestral founders. They didn’t create the world—the world exists already in their mythology—but instead they provide technology, of you will. Sometimes there’s things like how mountains got certain shapes or how islands got a certain shape: it’s explained by their mythology. They’re an oral culture, and this is how they explain the reality of things. So when the white man showed up, with the white skin, they interpreted this as the younger brother having come back, and their technology is based on the secret names of the spirits of rocks and trees and secret magical incantations. This is how you have material prosperity: it’s through this knowledge.

And the white man shows up, these huge sailing ships: it’s Kulubob come back. And then the missionaries come and they talk about Jesus. And there was much misunderstanding about what was going on, and then it got worse. In World War II, the Americans show up to drive the Japanese out, and the Australians. All these ships come, unloading cargo. So the problem is, with the Ogea and others, is the Gospel at first seemed to be the “good news” of cargo. And then it was interpreted to be the bad news of the white missionaries holding out on the secret. He’s not telling us the secret names of God and the secret magical incantations.

So if I come back another time, I’ll tell you what happened. But I’ll tell you how I got to the end, but the end is that the Ogea, many of them turned from their syncretistic ways to evangelize their own people and have planted 25 churches in surrounding language groups. They became missionaries. That is every missionary’s dream. I give God the glory. I had a very small part to play in this. It was obviously a work of the Holy Spirit. So that’s the background.

On the translation side, I trained Ogea speakers to do the translation, and then I would check it so I could look at the Greek, because they weren’t working from Greek. We also had it checked by consultants within Wycliffe Bible Translators, and we published Mark, and then Luke and Acts as a single volume, and just this year the entire New Testament was printed. God willing, next year I’ll go back for a dedication of the Ogea New Testament.

After that I went to work with the US government in software development, in an organization that does payroll and HR—not quite as exciting as the work I’d been doing, but for 12 of those years I led multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects doing software development and implementation, and headed up a division of software developers, systems analysts, system administrators, and you’ll see why… I ask you to forgive me for talking about myself, but you’ll see why in just a minute I’m bringing this up.

It was always my goal that when I completed working with the government—thank you for the pension—I was going back into missions work. So five years ago I began planning a third career, and I started talking to OCMC. They said, “Oh, with your background in Bible translation, we’d like you to think of the problem of liturgical translation in the mission field.” So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve moved to a third career. I retired from the government July 31 of this year, moved to St. Augustine, Florida, where OCMC has their headquarters, and I’ve been working full-time with them since on a project that I’m going to show you in just a minute.

I love languages. I love to learn languages, I love studying languages, I love learning about other cultures—but I have to tell you that when I come to worship God, I thank God for the people who translated the liturgy into my mother tongue, into English, because when I hear, I want to understand, I want to be moved, I want to turn to God, I want to be healed. But unfortunately around the world the situation is not as nice as it is for us here in the United States. In East Africa alone there are over 200 languages. Many tribes have become Orthodox, and every year there are more. Thank God for Archbishop Makarios, who believes strongly in having the liturgy in the language of the people. In Guatemala, Mayan tribes have become Orthodox. I’m sorry that because of weather last year you didn’t get to have the speakers come and tell you what was going on, but they, too, would like to have the liturgy in their mother tongue.

Well, let’s talk about the challenge for a minute. Everything that I’m about to say, none of it is meant to disparage work that has been done. If you go to visit the seminary in Nairobi, there are many publications of translations there. There’s a translation office and publications office. Frankly, out of necessity they’re doing what they’re doing. I’m going to paint a picture now of what the problem is and what I hope that, collectively, we can do to come alongside our brothers and sisters and help them.

You see up here a stack of the Greek liturgical text. I work very closely with Fr. Seraphim Dedes—eMatins; I don’t know if any of you know who that is? Yep—and we are loading into an electronic library the Greek text which was scanned by a Fr. Leo Schefe. Fr. Seraphim has a team of people who are comparing it against the published text from the Church of Greece and correcting it to that. So he purchased a set from Greece. So I said, “Well, I want a picture of it, because I want to show people. It’s a big stack.” He gave me this picture, and then a couple of weeks later he said, “Oh, I’m missing a couple volumes. It’s bigger than this.”

I want you to look at this young man here, because he, to me, is the poster child of the issues that are facing indigenous priests. I went to Nairobi a year and a half ago to meet with His Eminence Archbishop Makarios, with Fr. Raphael who heads up the translation and publications office and also with the liturgics professor there. I gave them a little presentation on the translation process that is followed in Wycliffe Bible Translators. There was excitement about that, and they’d like to see that tailored into liturgical translation.

Then one evening someone came to my room and said that His Eminence said that there’s this young man who needs help, and we can spare two hours for you to teach him how to be a translator. Now consider this is two hours more than anybody had gotten prior to that, okay? This is not to fault anybody; this is just the reality of the situation. So this young man is typical of the seminarians there: He has a high school education. The language of instruction at the high school seminary is in English, but for most of the students—I might say all of them—English is a second language, and they vary in their ability to understand and to speak English. He does not know how to read the Greek. He had completed one year of seminary, and he was told that: Your summer assignment is to translate the Presanctified Liturgy into your language. It’s out of necessity that they’re doing this.

So I started trying to teach him as much as I could in two hours, and one thing I wanted to talk to him [about] was the idea of implied information versus explicit information, and the need sometimes in translation to make explicit what is implied. I thought that I was safe if I used as an illustration from the liturgy, where it says, “The doors, the doors!” Right, it’s in the accusative? It just says, “The doors, the doors!” Do something to the doors: there’s implied information. Close them, guard them. And you all are nodding like this, but when I brought it up with him, there was a look of puzzlement. I realized the situation was even worse than I thought, because he didn’t have the understanding even of basic things in the liturgy. So he faces the problem of what does the text say, what does it mean, how can I translate it, and ideally he should have examples to look at to see how have other people handled the problems that I’m facing.

I’d like to regress for just a second and talk about what is available for Bible translation. In Bible translation, we have amazing tools available. I have to say, when I started out, I was in a village. The villages: no electricity, no running water; it’s still that way today. I had a solar-powered… I had a 12-volt battery; that was my electricity. I had a manual typewriter. I had carbon paper—I’m trying to remember what it’s called now. We don’t do that any more! [Laughter] To reproduce things. I had a silk-screen stencil. I’d get on the typewriter and type that up and put this in and stencil stuff. When personal computers came out, boy, I had a big dream, and that’s what got me into the computer field.

But since then, what we have are, for example, translator’s handbooks. United Bible Society, together with Wycliffe Bible Translators and other Bible translation organizations who now have experience working in several thousand languages around the world, have compiled exegetical commentaries that deal with translation problems. When I went over there, I didn’t have those at first, and I took with me commentaries on the New Testament, thinking they’d be useful, and discovered they were next to worthless for the problems I was trying to solve. So the translator handbooks, they’re very interesting. One statement, when I was researching how am I going to translate “believe” in Ogea—you know “believe, faith”—and it said, “In many languages of the world, there is not a separate word for “believe” and “obey.” And then it said, “This makes for poor theology, but strong churches.” [Laughter] I got a big chuckle out of that.

On top of that, we have now software tools like Paratext from the Bible Society where we have… Did any of you use Accordance? No? I recommend you look at it. If you have a Mac, you need Accordance. But anyway, Paratext is similar from the Bible Society. It has the Greek, it has the Hebrew, it has translations in dozens of languages—French, Russian, German, English, everything you’d want. It has texts to compare; we call those model translations. Also you have your own language, and with it you can do things like produce a concordance on the fly. You get a list of the words, you click, it pulls everything—all the translations, the Greek and your own translation, up to that spot at the same time, so you don’t have to worry about scrolling. It can produce word lists with frequency counts, which is very useful in languages that are highly inflected and we don’t have spell checkers. You run a word list with frequency count, sort, look at the words that occur once or twice, because there’s a good chance they could be misspellings. Not necessarily, but it’s a good way to find a misspelling. They’re also tied to lexicons. It gives you the grammatical information, you click, it pulls up meanings, it’s tied to the translator’s handbooks—wonderful tools. Those don’t exist today, but this is my dream that we will have these kind of tools in the future.

Another challenge, thanks to the electronic texts that we obtained from Fr. Leo Schefe: I ran a program and found that there are over two million words in the Greek liturgical text. How long would it take one person to translate all of that? Bible translation projects typically last 10 to 20 years for the full cycle. The liturgical texts are 11 times the size of the New Testament. Maybe that explains why we don’t have everything in English yet—or partly. So the vision that I have—and this is shared by OCMC—that we don’t turn anybody away. Every Orthodox parish in the world should have the opportunity to worship God in the mother tongue of the majority of its parishioners. We shouldn’t say, “Why go to the trouble? Make them learn Greek. Make them learn Slavonic, whatever.” Of course, bless St. Innocent of Alaska and what he did. When he went to the Aleuts, for example, he did not say to them, “To hear the Gospel, to read the Scriptures, to worship God, you must learn Russian or Slavonic.” He spent the time with them, learned their language, created an alphabet, translated for them. He is a great example for us.

So the mission of my work—and I hope that it’s going to become a team of people laboring, whether they’re in OCMC, whether they’re at seminaries, or wherever—is to equip translators of the Orthodox liturgical texts with the knowledge and tools they need to produce accurate and understandable translations. This is to be done through tools, training, and time, and I’ll be talking about software tools that have been developed in just this past year and a half. I’ve been working as a software developer—that’s the reason I brought up my background. So when I talk about these crazy visions I have, I did that kind of thing in the government. I had these visions. I went and secured funding. I had people working with me, and we did these things. And I’m bringing this now, this vision of software tools, and I’m saying: We can do this.

So I’ll be talking about what we call AGES Liturgical Workbench and AGES OnDemand. Translator’s handbooks: we need those for liturgical translation. I was not Orthodox when I was with the Ogea, and since becoming Orthodox, I thought about: What would it be like to translate the Creed into the Ogea language? And immediately I ran into a problem. “I believe in one God, Father Almighty.” Ogea is one of a number of languages that have what are called inalienably possessed nouns. Certain nouns like body parts and kinship terms cannot exist apart from a person. So you can’t say “father” or “the father”; you have to say “my father” or “your father” or “our father.” So a translator’s handbook on the Creed has to say: If your language demands a possessive pronoun, use “our.” At least, that’s the preliminary answer I have. I asked Fr. Ephrem Lash his opinion. “I don’t know. What do you think? Is “our” a good one?” [Laughter] What else? Well, you could say “his,” but it’s like Fr. Ephrem said: We haven’t talked about Jesus yet, and suddenly we’re doing to introduce… “Our” is probably the best. But that’s what a translator handbook should cover, and that’s what we need, are these handbooks.

Also I envision that we would take courses in liturgical translation overseas to Nairobi. When I met with them, they said: You know, the seminary isn’t in session in the summer. We have all these classrooms. Let’s start holding liturgical translation courses, and people from all over Africa could come and take these courses. We need to bring them to Guatemala, to Indonesia, to wherever it’s needed.

And then also we can do thing like translation workshops. In Bible translation sometimes what would happen is that we’d have experts in exegesis of the text and translation problems come, and we’d have a workshop. People from different languages would come. There would be lectures in the morning about the meaning of the text, translation problems, how to solve them. In the afternoon, they would go and translate. If they had problems, they had experts on the spot to confer with. This is the kind of thing that we could do to become like paracletes, those who come alongside these priests that are overseas, and help them.

Fr. Seraphim Dedes, with the blessing of Metropolitan Alexios of Atlanta in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, founded a non-profit called AGES Initiatives. AGES means Auto Generated Ecclesiastical Services. He was a monk on Mount Athos for 16 years, and he became an abbot of a monastery here in the United States. For over 10 years, he’s produced by hand what’s called eMatins, where he compiles the matins services, sometimes vespers, with the variable parts. And his dream was to be put out of business. So he founded this organization. He’s interested not just in translations but also the whole music ministry of the Church. I’ll explain now what we’re doing.

AGES Liturgical Workbench is software that we have almost completed, ready for us. It will be piloted—well, it’s being piloted now, but it will be ready for people to use on a wider basis this summer, God willing. It’s what is known as open source software. What that means is that the source code will be placed on the internet on a public site where people can get the source code. If they want to, they can modify it, enhance it, but because of the licensing they’re required to put the modifications back up there on the internet, and everybody benefits from it. It’s not owned by anyone; it’s owned by the Church at large, but AGES is the custodian of the software, if you will. It runs on Apples, it runs on Linux, it runs on Windows. It’s written in Java, if any of you are programmers. It’s designed to work off the internet, because overseas, in Africa, either they don’t have internet access or it’s very unreliable, so it has to be able to operate off the internet. It has tools for preparing translations for publication, and it generates the services for you, or it generates PDF files of books to be sent for printing. We’re going to add to it translation tools, and we have this slogan: “From the translator’s hand to the chanter’s stand.”

This slide that I’m showing shows the components of AGES Liturgical Workbench. We have a library that we’re finishing offloading the Greek, and as I said it’s being confirmed to the Church of Greece publication. We’re adding translations in it. Fr. Seraphim is putting his in, but it’s not about his translations. Yes, he’s interested in that, but that’s not what it’s about. We have designed the library so that every file in the library says what language it is, as spoken in what country, and for which jurisdiction. Because Swahili as spoken in Tanzania is slightly different from Kenya or Uganda. Of course, we have the Queen’s English that we have to account for, versus the corrupt American English, right? So we built it into the file names. Of course, the bishops have the final say about what’s in the text, so it’s tailored, tailorable, to each bishop’s level.

And then we have created a new programming language that has a vocabulary for liturgics. Fr. Seraphim writes in that what we call templates. A template is like a form letter, where it has fixed parts and variable, and fills it in. But in this case what it is is just descriptions of what the service is, and there are templates for every month and day, for each type of service, and whether it falls on a weekday, a Saturday, or a Sunday. And within it, it has information: if the mode is such-and-such, do this; if not, do this. Another thing that we’ve done is to address the issue of over two million words in the liturgical text: we are storing things just once in the library. Think of the word “priest” as the actor in a service. “Lord, have mercy” over and over. The Lord’s prayer, litanies—these are all reusable pieces. What we’re doing is: You translate it once, store it once, and then we’ll reuse it where it’s needed. Now, just to be clear, I’m not talking about machine translation. We are not doing that. Human beings have to do the translation. This is just storage of the translation itself.

So these templates, at the moment, are being written against the typikon of Constantinople, but, again, they can be customized to be any typikon. A software developer in Denver, Colorado, named John Holder, wrote us a module that we call the rubrics engine. This is able to calculate when Pascha is and all the dates that derive from that. It knows what the mode of the week it is, it knows what feast day it is, what day in Lent it is—everything that goes into figuring out what the variable parts are to put into a service, and even sometimes with the order of the services. So then what happens is the user says what language or languages they want, as long as they’re in the library, and the generator then talks to the rubrics engine to get the liturgical properties of the day for that service, reads the template, and pulls the appropriate translation or sources from here and generates out HTML, PDF, and in the near future ePUB. If you’ve ever used iBooks on iOS, or something like that… I have older eyes; I love it. When I hit that big A and get that big print… You can’t do that as easily in a web browser. They don’t format properly. So we’re going to take care of the aging folks, okay?

This is an example of template fragments. Insert section enarxis. Insert this section, great litany, and it points to this. This is being inserted at this point. This says insert an actor. This is a key. It says “deacon,” and that’s in English, but it’s really pointing back to the library and will plug in whatever language values we’ve asked for. Insert section great litany one: here’s great litany one. Dialogue, petition one, two, three, four, etc. So we have all these reusable components and we compose them, and then we also have in the library, it’s broken up by the liturgical books: heirmologion, orologion, etc.

This is an example of what an editor would look like for translators. We haven’t really focused on that yet, but to give you a feel, we have here English as in United States, Greek, Swahili from Kenya. The Finns like to go to East Africa, and they like to have the Finnish in the services. We have Finnish here, English. You can imagine, then, it’s a resource for people to see different translations in the original, and put their own in.

These are examples of generated services. This is Greek-English, Swahili-Finnish, English and Kiswahili, or Swahili. These are generated from the same template. You build the template once, and then we can generate it all for all these different languages as long as they’re in our library.

This is matins generated for last November 10. We have Greek on one side, and we have English on the other side. This can be used in a concept of what’s known and Fr. Seraphim calls Digital Choir Stand. People can use this at home to practice. In his parish that he’s at right now, they actually have computer monitors up at the choir stand. This shows you what it looks like on the monitor. Whatever languages you want, and notice that there’s a link here. It says, “Score-W.” It stands for score, Western. If you click on it, it brings up the score for a particular composition for that hymn. We also support other… Whatever scores: Byzantine, if you’re doing that. We also have in it the ability to have audio recordings, and then it’ll play those. So when you generate the service, it not only figures out the variable parts and puts in the appropriate hymns, it gives you scores and audio recordings for that generated hymn.

AGES Workbench today is generating services. For November and December, Fr. Seraphim used it to generate the services instead of him doing it by hand, so we’re putting him out of business just like he wanted, so he can do other things. We also are able to generate out an entire website. What that means then is you’re going to be able to say, let’s say for an entire year, you can say what services you want, which translations you want, what media you want, what scores and recordings, generate that out. You can zip it up, drop it into a webserver—so http://www.whatever/ and whatever the path is, whatever you want to name it—let’s say DCS for Digital Choir Stand—and you have an entire website right there. In Africa, they can do that, put it on a memory stick, give it to people—many of them have computers, but they don’t necessarily have internet access—they can take it with them to the village.

Also, well, this is just a mock-up of a delivery system. If you can imagine in the US, pick your metropolis, pick what service, pick what languages, what formats you want, hit submit, and you have it on your mobile device, whether it’s an iPhone, a tablet, or whatever. There will also be a version that is by country, so you pick your country, pick your jurisdiction, pick your languages, etc.

What about the guy who doesn’t have a computer, he lives near a small town in Africa, [and] he doesn’t have much money? The concept that Fr. Martin Ritsi of OCMC has is, well, let’s produce a print copy that is marked, as you see here, A, and he can go to an internet cafe and print the variable part, just like an insert in a bulletin in your parish today. They have bound books like this, and they print each week at the internet cafe the little bit, and they can link up the As and the Bs. This is important, because I asked James Hargrave who worked in a number of years in Tanzania; I asked him, “What do they use for vespers and orthros in the churches in Africa?” And he said, “Well, they have these tattered bound books, but they have no variable part. They sing the same thing every week and every feast. They’re missing out on the great liturgical life that’s available through the hymnography.” So this is a way, then, that we can also enrich their lives.

The near-term plan, then, is to complete the website generation. There’s still some things that we’re doing. There’s actually going to be an iPad version come out, hopefully early next year. Finish off on the PDF generation: we can do it, but there’s some things that we need to work on; ePUB generation, and, importantly, as people are hearing about this, they’re getting excited, and saying, “I want my language added it.” We haven’t focused on how you get the translations in. We’ve been doing it behind the scenes, and it’s not the kind of tools that you want to give to the average person who isn’t a computer geek and really wants to do this. What we’re envisioning is we would like to see an international repository on the internet of source languages, Greek and Slavonic and others, as well as translations, in a tightly-controlled environment, with online tools for people to submit their translation and online review by qualified people with approval processes—blessings by bishops, if we can get that—and then this would become the database, if you will, from which we can pull these translations and use them in tools like this. So this is what we’re going to be looking at, starting up this spring.

In addition, we will begin beta-testing of the software with Greek and English. It is being used today in Charlotte, North Carolina, but we’re going to expand that out at the beginning of the year, and in the summer we also have some metropolises that are going to start experimenting with it. Importantly, my focus is not on the US; it’s overseas. So the week after Christmas, I’m headed to Nairobi and stopping in London to meet with Fr. Ephrem Lash, who graciously agreed to meet with me so we can talk about the situation overseas and get his advice. And I’ll be in Kenya, then, meeting with Archbishop Makarios, Fr. Raphael, and the translation and publications office, show them the software, and help them get started with loading translations, because we hope that this summer in June I’ll go back for an extended period and teach them how to actually use this software, and then they can start getting benefits from it.

I apologize, but I’m a long-term kind of guy and I have a 15-year plan. So what I’d like to do is finish up Workbench. AGES on-demand is like an iPhone app that you saw there. And then we’ll go into adding more translations, as I talked about, and adding Greek tools. We want to add interlinear to the Greek; we want to add grammatical tagging; we want to add links into lexicons. By the way, I know you all know this, the Bible was not written with chapter and verse numbers; it got added. We need that for the liturgical text. I mean, we’re doing it. We actually have created the equivalent of chapter and verse. We need it to generate. But think about it: if we have a standard way to refer to this part of the service or this hymn, then we can build tools that use the same keys, tools that explain what that reference is to that father, so you can write an explanation, and we can put this on this international database on the internet and build tools off of that. The ability to create a concordance of the Greek or Slavonic text: that’s the kind of thing that I’m envisioning and want to see developed.

Courses: I already teach OCMC missionaries language-learning techniques. I’ll continue doing that. We will be training people around the world on the use of AGES software. I envision liturgical translation courses, but I hear you already got one, so that’s great. We’ve got to talk! Along with that, it’s helpful for people to have a brief introduction to linguistics. We want to give them some understanding of how to manage a translation project and how to do the quality assurance.

I talked about the need of translator’s handbooks. I’ve said repeatedly I only became Orthodox five years ago. If they said to me, “We want to establish an OCMC Bible-translation program,” I can do that, by the grace of God, but when you say liturgical translation, I’d say, “Well, you know, I’m like halfway there…” A lot of Bible translation principles still apply to liturgical translation, but you know what? I get it. I need to know liturgical theology, I need to know liturgical Greek, I need to know the Church music—because if what you translate can’t be chanted, what’s the point? And I need to know the liturgical language so well, and the people at OCMC doing this need to know it so well that they can pick up the text, read it on the spot, translate it, explain it, explain the references, talk about translation problems. Otherwise, why go over there to help them? We need to know these things in order to help them. So recognizing that, I plan to, God willing, spend the next two to four years going back to school, and I’m planning to start out at Holy Cross—who knows? I may come here; it may be nice; I may wind up in Greece for some, but the thing is that I believe I need to have, and OCMC people specializing in this, have to have a depth of understanding that’s probably beyond what the average seminarian has. So I think that there’s some tailoring that we need, some more directed studies to go deeper. And I look to you all to tell me your opinion in how we might do this.

So as part of my future education in the Orthodox world, I plan to do for my thesis a translator’s handbook on the Nicene Creed, and I plan to collect translations from Africa to work with native speakers to see what they’ve done, what kind of problems they’ve had, learn from faculty members here, elsewhere, and develop an example, then, of what a translator’s handbook would look like. God willing, I’ll go on and do as many as I can, but in truth my hope is that others will see the example and step in and help, because this is way more than one person’s work. I’m a crazy guy with crazy dreams, but I believe God is in this, and it takes a team, and I’d like you to think: Has God called you to ask you to participate in this? You are getting a theological education. Is he calling you to go deeper and to be a paraclete, one who comes alongside to encourage and to help that priest in Kenya, in Indonesia, in Guatemala, who has a dream to hear the Divine Liturgy in his language?

Questions. Yes? You already asked me many questions at dinner, so you used up your quota. No, I’m kidding. They are very good questions.

Q1: You just started speaking about the multitude of languages? My first language when I was a professional was about, actually in Kenya… Because I have talked to real Kenyans who are actually Orthodox and actually priests, and they said—I hope I’m not messing something up—they do have over, I think, 200 tribes and Kikuyu and other different languages, therefore, but they do use Swahili as a united language. I understand that perhaps the Tanzanian version would be somehow different, but Kenya is a pretty big country. So my question is: For now you’re concentrating on Swahili, maybe, for Kenya, or local, tribal? I can see the point of local, tribal languages perhaps down the line, because they do understand each other in Swahili rather well.

Dr. Colburn: Okay, for those who are hearing through a recording, I’m going to summarize briefly your two points and thus two questions. Number one is, because Swahili is widely spoken in Kenya and in East Africa, are we focusing on that? And secondly, if it’s widely spoken, is it not sufficient just to have that? Why do translations into the other languages? Is that fair?

Q1: Yes. As far as other languages, there aren’t that many.

Dr. Colburn: First off, for Swahili, it is a priority, because it is widely spoken and secondly it is, for those who do want a translation in their own language, but they don’t know Greek, they can use Swahili as a source text, but that also implies the need for someone who is an ex-patriate, a missionary who knows the Greek and can look at the translation, or there are Kenyans who’ve learned Greek, but someone else to come alongside and test the translation and review it. But that is a priority for us.

The second aspect for that is: Isn’t that sufficient? Well, let me tell you the story of three—it’s two women and a man—who went to Tanzania and were medical specialists. In OCMC, whether you say you’re going for two years or for lifetime, you’re told you’re going to spend the first year in language learning. They were told… They went to a place, I think it’s Bukobu, Bukoba? I’m not sure, but it was away from the cities—it was a smaller size town—where there’s a medical center. Because Swahili is widely spoken, that’s what they were going to learn. I was working with them, Skyping with them, talking with them about their language learning. After a number of months, they said to me, “We just discovered that people aren’t speaking Swahili here. They’re speaking their local language.” They didn’t know enough Swahili to even know it wasn’t Swahili being spoken widely. And what I’ve been told is, even though the national school system requires Swahili and English, that in fact when you get outside of the cities, it’s the local language that is the everyday language.

So why bother? I’m back to that. You remember what I said? You see, you hear. You see the censer swung, you hear these words beat in your eardrums, but you don’t understand with your heart, so you don’t turn, and you’re not healed. Christ said make disciples of all nations, so that’s why we do it.

Q1: Just one more, but it’s a long one, actually. What I’ve heard, not from Kenyans, but just… For example, the Bible we have has “cleanse me like snow.” [Inaudible] But Kenyans don’t know what snow looks like. [Laughter] I can just say that from my personal experience. What I’ve heard—I don’t know if it’s true [Inaudible]—was that translators would use, “Make me white as the inside of a coconut,” and that works, because that’s what they’re used to. But when you translate, does this happen to you, that you have to replace the word with another word that is intercultural? And don’t you have the risk that you have coconuts instead of snow and you have other things instead ofthings they’re used to, and you won’t recognize the Bible any more.

Dr. Colburn: So the question is: What do you do when there are references to things in the Scriptures that are not part of a target-language culture, and therefore how do you translate it and how would they understand it? The example that you gave was snow, and you heard that some people had used “white as coconut” instead of “white as snow.” Yes, it does happen, and it’s a tricky thing. I’m going to illustrate it from Ogea, the language I worked in. The Ogea are egalitarian. They don’t have kings, they don’t have chieftains, and so how do you translate “the kingdom of God”? No concept of a king or of a kingdom. What I found was an idiom in the language that says, “someone sitting beneath another person.” It turned out that what that implies is their submission to the person’s authority and that person’s care of that person who has submitted to them. That’s how we translated “the kingdom of God.” Sometimes you have to borrow words and then give explanations. Other times there are ways to capture the meaning. It’s a very tricky business, and that is why we have review processes with consultants who look at the translations, too.

Q2: I’ve only just learned this last year, that a project in Kodiak, Alaska is having an enormous impact in the recovery of languages that almost disappeared, which is the native language of Kodiak Island, which is Alutiiq. What we’ve learned, very recently, is that within one generation the first Orthodox missionaries had the people literate, which is remarkable, if you think about it, but because they translated the text into Alutiiq, and the text was preserved, it’s now being used to recapture the language that was forgotten. So when you look at the thousands of languages you put up here, I guess the question would be: How many of those are disappearing, and for how many will the actual text translations help to preserve the language?

Dr. Colburn: I don’t have… The question is: What is… The example was given of the native language of the Native Americans on Kodiak Island and Alaska, and how translations done, presumably in the 1700s, maybe 1800s, are being used to revitalize the language. And the question is: How many languages are facing extinction, and because of prior translations are able to preserve or revitalize the language? And I don’t know. But it’s absolutely true what you’re saying, that going into preliterate societies and helping them have a body of literature does help to slow down or to preserve that language. But there are many languages in the world—if you go to Ethnologue, you can read which ones—that are in danger of becoming extinct. Yes?

Q3: When you go to a language that is not written, what do you choose for the written text?

Dr. Colburn: I’m going to rephrase the question, and tell me if I got it right or not, okay? I think what you’re asking me is: What letters do you use for the alphabet for a language that doesn’t have an alphabet? The answer depends mostly on what is the alphabet used in the country on a national level. For example, in Papua New Guinea, the national language for education and government is English, and they use Roman script. So we use Roman script for Ogea, but we have to have different values, if you will, sounds, assigned to certain letters, because they don’t map one-for-one. In countries that have Arabic script, for example, you’d use that, Devanagari, whatever. You just adapt it. But you often have to assign a different sound to that letter. Yes?

Q4: In your software, the AGES software: How far along are you with producing, building the services for public access, building the services with musical scores and sound? And how are you using the Church musicians? Where is the music coming from? Where is the score coming from?

Dr. Colburn: So the question was: Where are we at with AGES Liturgical Workbench in terms of our ability to generate services with scores and sound, audio recordings? And where do those scores and recordings come from? Right? Okay, we are generating the services today. We—Fr. Seraphim Dedes has generated all of November: vespers, orthros, Divine Liturgies with its variable parts: November and December. So we’ve already begun, but it’s not publicly available, because we’re testing it. We want to make sure we got it right before it goes live. So he’s using it at St. Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we plan to start using it early next year in my parish in St. Augustine—let them become guinea pigs, too. You should see it start becoming publicly available this summer, but even then we’re going to roll it out slowly, because we want to do what’s called pilot testing before it goes out to everybody.

Now your other question of: Where’s the content coming from? At the moment, it’s all from Fr. Seraphim Dedes, but it’s designed to be anybody’s composition, any translation, any language, any recording. We’ve set up the framework, so when people come—let’s say a diocese wants to implement its use—we would work with them. They would say: Here’s the translation I want to use, here are the recordings I want to use, here are the scores that I want to use. So it would be tailored to that diocese or archdiocese, if they wanted to say it’s going to be throughout the country.

Q4: Will it be sold or will it be free or?

Dr. Colburn: It will not be sold. There can be a content issue, though. If the translators… Fr. Seraphim’s things are free, but there may be other publishing houses that say there are royalties involved. We haven’t quite solved that. We know that it’s going to happen, but then what happens? Are people then going to subscribe if they want that? The other thing is, we will provide it as is, and we will provide training materials online, but if someone said, “You know, we like the way it is, but we want you to tailor it,” now we’re in a different world, because he doesn’t have time to be doing that, I’m off doing other things. We envision, though, that there will be a need for people who are paid, then, to provide a service to tailor it. But if you’re happy with it out of the box, with whatever translations have been added into it and what’s available, then it’s free. Yes?

Q5: Somebody open sources, then it will be an open-source source code project?

Dr. Colburn: Yep. It’ll be on Github. Because I’m the only programmer right now working on it, I’m not putting it on Github. I do have it backed up. But when I have the first public release, from then on it will be on Github.

Q5: My next question: Do you have any idea when that will be? When it will be released?

Dr. Colburn: Probably I’d say maybe around May? Don’t hold me to it, but that would be my goal. But most people won’t want the source code.

Q5: Well, I’m talking about other developers.

Dr. Colburn: Yeah, yeah. But remember, with the open-source license, if you modify it, you’ve got to put it back. Yeah. So you can help us now, then! [Laughter]

Q6: From the presentation you’ve given, I see that all the source material comes from the Greek tradition, which is certainly venerable, but if we’re to use it here in the States in the OCA, it wouldn’t be a useful source. So we would need, for example, different rubrics, different music, and different translations, too. You’ve talked about the possibility of adding translations and tailoring music or adding different music, but you haven’t mentioned anything about changing or adding to the rubrical end of it.

Dr. Colburn: I thought I had, forgive me.

Q6: Or did I miss it?

Dr. Colburn: Absolutely. It’s been designed from the ground for any language, any country, any jurisdiction, so that it can be tailored, whether it’s the library, whether it’s a choice of the source of Slavonic versus Greek, and what translations. The typikon templates can be modified. What scores you want, what recordings—it is all tailorable by design.

Fr. Chad: I want to thank you for your time with us tonight. It’s been incredibly informative with a lot of information. Some of us are going to lie awake tonight, trying to contemplate everything that you’ve presented here. I think there is a lot of interest amongst the students, and there is a reception that follows, in the bottom of this building, to which you’re all invited. There will probably be time for more questions. So, again, thank you for being with us. [Applause]