LOST (& FOUND) IN TRANSLATION
We praise God that we recently finished editing three Roma language translations of the Gospel of Matthew and began Paul’s letter to Titus. (I’m pictured above on Zoom doing a consultant check in Matthew.)

In the first chapter, there were several issues we had to wrestle with. For example, in Titus 1:4, Paul says that Titus is his “genuine” son. The draft translation used the Serbian word for “real”, but the translators pointed out that that could only be understood as meaning his biological son, so we had to change it to a Chergash (Roma) word meaning “true” to make it clear that Titus was not Paul’s son in a physical sense. In 1:6-7, Paul says an elder must be “blameless”. This can trip up the reader if he thinks it means “perfect” or “sinless”. We decided to translate it as “a man about whom nothing bad can be said”. 1:15 says “to the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled, nothing is clean”, but in Chergash there are no words for “pure” or “defiled” so they used the word “clean” and “dirty”. But to make it clear that this is not talking about people being physically dirty, we adjusted it to “to people clean from sin, all is clean, but to people who are dirty with sin, nothing is clean.”