Building Partnership Between Church Interpreting and Bible Translation

This paper examines the relationship between church interpreting and Bible translation and suggests ways that the two can work in partnership. Church interpreting is understood as the process of taking what is said or signed in one language in a church context and producing a new version in another spoken or signed language. While historical and experimental research has revealed that interpreting and Bible translation were closely related in the past, the contemporary relationship between the two is ambiguous. This paper will argue that the two practices should be reconciled for practical, theological, and theoretical reasons. I will also suggest places where the theory and practice of church interpreting can feed into Bible translation practice and theory and where church interpreting can learn from Bible translation. Most notably, it is argued that the innate contextualisation of church interpreting, as well as the growing understanding of interpreting as the negotiation of meaning, offers important insights into what it means to deliver an excellent Bible translation.