Gender Accurate Translation and Interpretation

Wayne Leman has an exceptional post on women and Bible translation. We talk a great deal about gender accurate (or I still like gender-inclusive) language, but it’s men that are doing most of the talking. That’s because there are more men than women involved in translation. I’m in full agreement with what Wayne says in his post, but I want to carry things just a step further.

First, however, I want to make sure you understand what I mean when I say I’m an egalitarian. It doesn’t mean that I believe men and women are the same. Thank God they are not! What it means is that I believe that each person should be start on a level playing field and be appreciated and used in accordance with their gifts. So how could I support putting more women on Bible translation committees any more than I could support putting more men on them? The problem is that we are human, and some of us are guys, and we may not think of all the gifts. Since I believe men and women are different, we need to go out of our way to hear what the other gender is thinking. Since translation is dominated by men, as is interpretation, we may tend not to think of the need for women’s gifts in our activity.

There’s no big wall here. Men can have some of these gifts, just as women can have gifts we consider the province of men. My wife and I reverse some of the activities that you might expect. In the properly male dominated home the guy drives, I’ve heard. I generally let me wife drive. She likes to, I don’t. We divide financial responsibilities. But stereotypical folks do exist, I suspect. The best way to be sure is to be inclusive.

I stated this in book on Bible translation:

I believe that the best translation is likely to result from a committee of persons with diverse beliefs, all of whom are committed to translating without allowing those beliefs to interfere. (A bias in favor of accurate translation would be entirely appropriate, and could not be said to interfere.) Since I believe nobody is entirely free of bias, the best defense against bias is diversity. However, diversity in which one simply averages out the results of the various biases still leaves too much room for inappropriate results, so I believe the one commitment all members of a translation committee should make is to accurate translation within the context of the methodology they have chosen. (This extract from pages 39-40 can be found at the Energion Publications Announcements Blog.)

I now believe this diversity should definitely be extended to include gender.

But shouldn’t this be extended to interpretation? If the Bible message was presented only to men, then perhaps only men should listen and understand. But if that was not the case, perhaps we lose something by not including the voice of women in our interpretation.

The last step of my method of interpretation is sharing. Some people wonder why I include sharing as part of the method of interpretation. There’s a level of accountability that results simply from expressing your understanding of scripture and listening to other people’s reactions to it. You can learn how you might be misunderstood. Others may point out things you had missed in studying the passage. You may learn of implications of your interpretation that you hadn’t comtemplated.

Ideally such sharing should include the entire community so that diverse people are heard from. Not just men and women, but people of different ages, races, and cultures should be included. Many errors of Biblical interpretation might be avoided if we learned to listen to the broadest and most diverse possible community.